Elleza Kelley, “Ordinary Allurements: Christina Sharpe’s Reading Lessons” (The Yale Review, 2023)

Black 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.” Across the smooth surface of the master narratives to which they are keyed, black notes disturb and disarrange.

Read more at The Yale Review.