Reviews

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects by Christina Sharpe

zachcarter's review against another edition

4.0

Christina Sharpe defines monstrous intimacies as ‘a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated and transmitted, that are breathed in the air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous’. Using fiction (Corregidora, Maru), non-fiction (Frederick Douglass and Essie-Mae Washington), film (The Attendant), and art (Kara Walker), she masterfully lays out her thesis of the construction of post-slavery subjectivities across the African diaspora. It was at times difficult to follow the thrust of her arguments, but the analysis was so detailed and the imagery so clear - I now have a much better understanding of the legacy of slavery and the condition of what she calls "relative freedom within unfreedom."

I plan to read "In the Wake" soon, which I imagine will clarify and expand on these theories and make even more clear my understanding of her work.