Ordinary Notes
These Black notes may land in silence or a tone, a sound,a pitch, a record, or an observation made with care; thesenotes might just reach you across distance, time andspace, and with them you may be 'held/and held'.
Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes is a dazzlingly inventive and powerful exploration of Black life, art, language, beauty and memory. Its more than three hundred notes collect into startling, rigorously constructed, beautiful layers, ranging across history, photography and literature to attend to everyday Black existence. Sharpe's consideration of Black life's ordinary-extraordinary dimensions shape-shifts through her mother's aesthetic of beauty as a method, gathers entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable Blackness, and probes sites of memory and memorials.
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge from the ruins, forging a new literary form as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces. The result is a multiverse of immense care, feeling and study.
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Publishing has a diversity problem. There are less 'diverse' books being published which limits the discoverability and reach of those authors.
Representation is important. Read more about why we exist here.
An anti-racist social enterprise bookstore specialising in BIPOC books.
Only about 11% of books published are by BIPOC authors — so unless you specifically seek out books by BIPOC authors, you aren't likely to find very many of them organically. At Amplify, BIPOC authors are highlighted and celebrated. Here, they don't have to fight to be seen, and you don't have to fight to find them.
We hope that in our shop, you can discover a new favourite read, find stories that speak uniquely to you, learn about a culture outside your own (or more about your own histories), and gain a better understanding of the systems that connect us all.
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