Professor Pratap Rughani joins Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor David Mba University of the Arts London in responding to the readings of “Ordinary Notes”, at Central St Martins, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AA, book here.

“A singular achievement, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes explores, with immense care, profound questions about loss, pain and beauty; private memory and public monument; art; complexity; and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that cumulatively gather meaning, artefacts from the past – both public ones and the poignantly personal – are skilfully interwoven with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.”

Christina Sharpe is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto and the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke 2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016) and Ordinary Notes (Knopf/FSG/Daunt 2023).