Ordinary NotesOrdinary Notes

Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes offers a vision of Black life, art, language, beauty, and memory. It's more than three hundred notes collect into layers, ranging across history, photography, and literature to attend to everyday Black existence. Sharpe's consideration of Black life's ordinary-extraordinary dimensions shape-shifts through her mother's aesthetic of "beauty as a method," gathers entries toward a Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness, and probes sites of memory and memorials. Ordinary Notes explores questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge from the ruins, forging a new literary form as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.