Race, religion, and revolution in the enlightenment (Editorial Introduction)

Abstract

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a meditation on “the wake as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.” The wake is the legacy of the ships of the Middle Passage, but also the emotional and creative response of members of the Black diaspora to that legacy. Sharpe’s witnessing raises issues of continuing systemic racism, the violence that continues to be visited upon Black bodies and Black lives, and the weight of history on the present.