If there is one thing that Ralph Ellison’s tour de force novel Invisible Man (1952) has helped insinuate into the cultural imaginary, it is the idea that Black people have been invisible or excluded from the politics of liberal humanism. The familiar interpretation of this conceit is that once Black people become fully visible to others as the humans they are, they will finally be included in the hallowed pale of legitimacy. Yet many Black Studies scholars have tried to temper such potentially uncritical valorization of visibility/inclusion, arguing that Black people have been not so much invisible as mis-visible, not so much excluded from as deceptively conscripted into the liberal humanist matrix that exploits Blackness as its foundational abjection. As an integral part of this scholarly strand, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes interrogates how language performs this (mis)representation of Blackness in a way that amplifies its abjection, thus problematizing recognition as a racially inflected notion that warrants a careful recalibration in Black lives.

Running through Sharpe’s book is the premise that seeing is not neutral, mediated as it is by the optical screen of ideology that provides an organizing illusion of the object world. Sharpe invokes Roland Barthes’s concept of camera lucida—“an optical device meant to aid the accurate drawing of objects, through the process of superimposition”—to figuratively define the discursive veil that imposes or occludes rather than illuminates. Hence “the power of stories to shape realities—to shape how we see each other and ourselves.” In this context, “any so-called neutral position” that disregards the politics of (mis-)recognition is “a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such,” an act of seeing that blatantly un-sees through the studied opacity of its lens. Under this assumption, Sharpe demystifies the dominant colonial optics that traffic in anti-Blackness under an ordinary, innocent, and universal guise. This racialized way of looking performs a “misnaming and mis-seeing” of Blackness by capturing Black people’s pain as a spectacle, producing “a single story of blackness as catastrophe” while eliding the underlying historical context of such suffering. Such a selective (dis)regard for Black trauma merely reopens the wound it professes to remediate, demonstrating “a profound lack of care” for Black lives in their complexity.

For instance, Barthes enshrines his own anti-Black camera lucida when he (mis)reads Black photographer James VanDerZee’s aunt in his family portrait as a “solacing Mammy.” According to Sharpe, this work of (un/mis) seeing Blackness as a constitutive supplement to individual authority/sovereignty is “the condition by which Barthes comes to (not) see himself” as above and beyond the scalpel of definition he so cavalierly inflicts upon the racialized subject. Thus does Sharpe pick away at the sublime cataracts of ideology through which the overrepresented Man unsees the political violence that so thoroughly constitutes his entitlements as the unmarked subject.

That said, even good-willed attempts at representing and recognizing Black pain are not immune from the risk of reinforcing the anti-Black gaze. In this sense, the book remains profoundly skeptical of contemporary memorials of slavery and racial violence, which not only force Black viewers to confront graphic reproductions of racial trauma but also falsely re-symbolize such atrocities as the index or vehicle of progress and healing. Such symbolic distantiation “sutures Black suffering to romance and redemption” for an undifferentiated “we” whose very postulation dilutes the complicity of some in the ongoing anti-Black violence. “In the face of the murders of Black people, murders that endlessly repeat,” queries Sharpe, “how can one presume, still, that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘we’ that are in something together?” In the enduring wake of slavery, the liberal humanist language of reconciliation and reparation simply weaves the veil of innocence and denial, under which “we” are always surprised by, rather than prepared for, the recurring news of anti-Black violence, which is understood as individual human(e) errors rather than the climate or weather. Inclusion and recognition, if inattentive to the irreconcilable specificities of Black lives, can wield violence in the name of redress.

To disrupt these anti-Black discourses, Ordinary Notes presents 248 Black notes arranged in eight sections—less like parallel chapters and more like a collage, layered and stitched together. These notes rearticulate the aspects of Black lives that cannot be facilely subsumed into the universalist and teleological monologue of liberal humanism. Encompassing diverse academic and personal accounts on Blackness that Sharpe either composes or cites from others, the notes comprise a fragmented, multivocal, and intertextual attestation to Black lives caught up in the wake of racial slavery, which the colorblind rubric of freedom/humanity/citizenship/democracy both dissimulate and perpetuate.

As Sharpe contends toward the end of the book, many standard concepts in our language—e.g., civilization, archive, memory, time, art, life, etc.—transmogrify when they approximate Black lived experiences, which manifest a radical departure from those of the universal, unmarked subject around whom the signifying chain revolves. When Black people continue to struggle in an atmosphere entirely hostile to them, and when the master signifiers of well-being, growth, and redemption cannot cohere around this mode of being, then what is “life” for Black people but a “praxis of insisting and persisting” within unlivable en/foreclosures?

In response, the book insists on a beauty that is both borne of and exceeds the impossibilities of anti-Blackness. Demonstrated in its eclectic use of theory, literary criticism, historiography, photography, memoir, and social media posts, Ordinary Notes proffers a “method” and “praxis” of the Black beauty that Sharpe (auto)theorizes, offering a discursive space for the “wayward” creativity that Black people have improvised to survive and thrive in the hostile weather. To stay attentive to this everyday difficulty of Blackness negotiated in and through contradictions—pain/pleasure, terror/beauty, death/life, individual/collective, political/aesthetic—is to perform care and tenderness against the “single story” of Black pathology or Black excellence. Sharpe’s Black notes thus see and feel Black being in all its trans-referential entanglements without confining it to definitional or generic categories, straining against the compartmentalizing grooves of scholarly monographs to inhabit Black letters in the wake—the oft-colonized backwash or interstices—of standard language.

Admittedly, though, Sharpe’s alternative looking or feeling is provisional, incomplete, and fraught. For the act of regarding Black lives with differences still risks reenacting the violence it tries to assuage. Indeed, despite her professed aversion to the discursive restaging of racial violence, Sharpe nevertheless does find herself at times bearing vivid witness to such violence, perhaps because it is so acutely unavoidable and pervasive, and because she “cannot surrender” the hope of repeating this painful look with difference or “tenderness,” of imagining a future that may be within/beyond the terrible now.

What Ordinary Notes passes on to its readers to work through, therefore, is this visceral sense of tug between representational initiative and restraint that reckons with the irreducible (im)possibility of (anti-)Black looking, an ethical precarity that the book exhorts scholars and artists to tarry with rather than avoid or dismiss. For those engaged in art, literary studies, and cultural theory who are willing to sit with this difficulty, Sharpe offers a profound, unflinching meditation on the tangled skein of rigorous discernment and cultural violence woven into the very lens/screen of scholarship.