“They don’t Want Your Dead Life, They Want Your Living Life”: Ethnography in the Wake

Abstract

This article creates a bridge between ethnography and black studies by fostering a dialogue between Christina Sharpe and Toni Morrison. We ask: what would it look like for ethnographers to engage in wake work? What ways of knowing and unknowing might we be able to rupture if we contend with the afterlives of slavery? We argue that Morrison charges the ethnographer to use wake work as a deciphering practice to make different conclusions about the representations of black life/living and the empirical realities of black people. To make our case, we conduct an exegesis of Morrison novel Song of Solomon to chart how wake work operates within the social lives of the community living on Not Doctor Street. We conclude with suggestions for what we term a “hesitant sociology of black living” that dissolves the responsibility to solely focus on how people in black communities are ensnared in the jaws of gratuitous violence.