An Intimate Evening with Christina Sharpe and 'Ordinary Notes'

TMU's Black Studies Speakers Series and Another Story Bookshop Present: An Intimate Evening with Christina Sharpe and 'Ordinary Notes'

Join us for a special evening at the Society Clubhouse where we will convene for a reading and engagement with Christina Sharpe's award-winning and path-breaking text: Ordinary Notes. Let's gather for Black thought, provocation and world-making.

Christina Sharpe, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, has been described by the New York Times as “shaping a generation of Black Thought.” She is one of the most influential contemporary scholars in North America.

"Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).

Her recent book, Ordinary Notes (2023), has been named a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

Speakers:
Dr. Christina Sharpe
Dr. Idil Abdillahi
Dr. Darcy Ballantyne
Sarah Tai-Black
Prof. Sam Tecle

Co-Sponsors:
Department of Sociology (TMU)
Department of Criminology (TMU)
Department of English (TMU)
Literatures of Modernity (TMU)
Yellowhead Institute
School of Social Work (TMU)
Black Studies Stream (TMU)
Black Future Lawyers (TMU)
Criminology Course Union (TMU)
Another Story Bookshop will be selling Ordinary Notes (2023) as well as Christina Sharpe's other books
ASL interpretation by Toronto Sign Language Interpreter Service