On March 20, 2024, McGill’s Department of English will welcome Professor Christina Sharpe for the 2024 Spector Lecture. Ahead of Professor Sharpe’s visit to McGill, the Department of English invited all students and faculty, as well as folks from the larger community, to a series of reading groups on Sharpe’s latest book, Ordinary Notes.
Over three meetings from November 2023 to February 2024, students discussed Sharpe’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust prize-winning book and her larger body of work in the context of the upcoming Spector Lecture.
“To say that the Ordinary Notes reading group has been a revelation would be to make an understatement,” says Master’s student Chetan Bhatnagar. “The gravity of Sharpe's work seems to settle upon all those that encounter it, much like its unmitigated beauty and strength. Seeing a note leap across both the room and across lives is an experience to behold.”
“As a Black student [at McGill], I cannot wait to welcome Professor Christina Sharpe to Montreal,” says English undergrad senior, Matthew Molinaro. “Black Studies and Ordinary Notes are grounded still in a practice and ethic of care, for our ancestors', contemporaries', and inheritors' everyday imaginations in the diaspora. Professor Sharpe has enriched the cross-disciplinary study of Black life—it is a blessing to learn from her."
Dr. Amber Rose Johnson, a McGill Third Century Postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English, facilitated the group discussions. We spoke to her about how students’ were engaging with the text and what the McGill community should expect from Professor Sharpe’s upcoming lecture.
Q: Christina Sharpe’s second book, In the Wake, explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the aftermath of Transatlantic slavery. What questions emerge from her newest work, Ordinary Notes?
ARJ: In Ordinary Notes, I witness Sharpe raising questions about the ways that terror accumulates across mundane encounters, how insidious violence both sits on the surface of and deeply embeds itself within our structural reality, and how complicity with this violence and terror is more common than not. But Ordinary Notes also raises questions about how life and life-giving intimacy can be forged against, within, and alongside such incredible impossibilities. Amid ongoing catastrophe, the book itself is an offering of care, especially for those of us who are made to bear the brunt of the harm that circulates in a racist and sexist capitalist world order built on exploitation and colonialism of many forms. The pedagogical thrust of the work exemplifies methods not just of reading, writing, and analyzing, but methods of living in relation with one another.
Q: What are some interesting points of discussion that have emerged from the reading groups?
ARJ: The reading group conversations that we’ve had thus far have been so rich and I feel grateful to have been able to host a space for folks to come together and really dig into Ordinary Notes together. A work of this magnitude requires, I think, an openness of time and space to meditate on the incredible depth and breadth of all it encompasses. As the book is comprised of notes, some of them as short as one sentence, others as long as two or three pages, it can be tempting to read through the text quickly. In our January reading group gathering, we discussed how the form of the text invites and encourages a kind of lingering, a sitting with and inside these ideas that shouldn’t be rushed.
The point was raised that if we take the open white space that fills many of the pages with shorter notes as an opportunity to reflect on how what was just read matters to our own lives, how our own subject positions are called in, then we can do the collaborative meaning-making work that the book invites.
One of the discussion threads that has been consistent between the two reading group meetings thus far has been about the ways that Sharpe names, with striking clarity, the subtle violences that occur within university and university adjacent spaces: classrooms, lecture halls, conversations between students, advisors, and chairs, question and answer periods after academic panels. Students and faculty have both been able to engage with these moments in the text and come to terms with how they have experienced or caused similar forms of harm here at McGill. Those moments feel especially important and have the potential to be transformative. In our last reading group meeting, we spent a lot of time talking about two words that are central to the text – beauty and regard. The meaning of these words as they emerge in this text cannot be simplified and I don’t feel comfortable even attempting to gloss them here. But in the reading group we have sat with these words and have meditated on how Sharpe engages them and puts them to use. I am looking forward to our final reading group meeting in advance of the Spector Lecture.
Q: How do you think students will engage with Professor Sharpe’s upcoming Spector Lecture?
ARJ: There is written about Christina Sharpe entitled, “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought” and that title is by no means an exaggeration. Between Monstrous Intimacies, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and now Ordinary Notes, Sharpe has blown open the possibilities for what a scholarly work can be and do, and has inspired so many of us to be more honest, more present, more bold in our risk-taking to try to produce the work that we want to exist in the world. I know that in my own experience of reading In the Wake as a graduate student, I clung to it as both a guide and source of inspiration.
Now engaging Ordinary Notes as a post-doctoral fellow on the cusp of becoming a professor, I feel the same. I imagine that many students (and faculty and staff) will attend the lecture with an eagerness not just to be inspired, but to find something they can hold on to and keep with them as we all continue to navigate this difficult life. I think especially for students and faculty who are working within the field of Black Studies, Sharpe’s visit will come as a gift and as a relief since we are writing and working in a context where Black Studies is not as supported as other fields. But there is something for everyone in Sharpe’s work and I anticipate in her lecture as well.
Q: What can the wider McGill community expect to learn from Professor Sharpe’s lecture?
ARJ: I think it is safe to say that Ordinary Notes does not organize itself around one central argument, as most scholarly works tend to do. Instead, Sharpe allows us to witness her work of witnessing and invites us to do the same. What comes of that is ours to shape. I think the McGill community can expect to learn that it is not enough to expect someone else to do the work that we must all, as individuals, do in order to change the climate of this life. There is no exporting this work and it cannot be done passively. I think we can expect to receive some tools, but ultimately, we will be sent back out to tend to our own gardens.
The annual Spector Lecture will be held on March 20, 2024 from 6-8PM in Room 100, the Maxwell Cohen Moot Court, at the Nahum Gelber Law Library, 3660 Peel Street. Seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.