BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//132.216.98.100//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.4// BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20250621T112656EDT-4092lvUUzi@132.216.98.100 DTSTAMP:20250621T152656Z DESCRIPTION:The Department of English invites graduate students and faculty to a reading group on Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes\, finalist for th e National Book Award and shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Discussion will be facilitated by Dr. Amber Rose Jo hnson\, 51łÔąĎÍřThird Century Postdoctoral Research Fellow.\n\nThe group wi ll meet three times leading up to Prof. Sharpe's Spector Lecture in March 2024. Please forward any questions to Professor Ara Osterweil [ara.osterwe il [at] mcgill.ca].\n\nMeeting Dates: \n\n(1) November 16\, 2023\, 4-6 PM\ , Leacock 738\n\n(2) January 17\, 2024\, 3-5 PM\, Graduate Studnet Lounge (Arts B-22)\n\n(3) February 26\, 2024\, 3-5 PM\, Graduate Studnet Lounge ( Arts B-22)\n\n\nThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake\, 'Christin a Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty an d possibility' (Saidiya Hartman).\n \n A singular achievement\, Ordinary Not es explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life tha t emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we r ead them\, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—publ ic ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realiti es and possible futures\, intricately constructing an immersive portrait o f everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these p ages—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.\n \n At the heart o f Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother\, Ida Wr ight Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house\,” writes Sharpe. “I l earned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a lov e of beauty\, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing \, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of 'beauty as a method\,” collects entries fro m a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness \,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the proce ss\, she forges a brilliant new literary form\, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.\n DTSTART:20240226T200000Z DTEND:20240226T220000Z SUMMARY:Reading Group: Christina Sharpe's 'Ordinary Notes' URL:/english/channels/event/reading-group-christina-sh arpes-ordinary-notes END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR