Ordinary Allurements: Christina Sharpe’s reading lessons

Abstract

lack writing, from W.E.B. Du Bois to John Keene, is full of rebellious paratexts rearing up from the margins and backs of books—epigraphs, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, and appendices that subvert, interject, and critique. These paratexts echo black inhabitations of space: they refuse to be subordinated. Epigraphs become musical notation; glossaries invoke spirits; appendices map other worlds. In Édouard Glissant’s 1989 Caribbean Discourse, a single footnote upends the entire formation of the West: “The West is not in the West,” it declares from the subterranean depths of the page. “It is a project, not a place.” books