“I was strangling words before they even left my throat,” she writes in “Ordinary Notes.” She developed the reflex after a series of incidents with academic luminaries (a “famous deconstructionist,” a “famous Americanist,” a “famous British feminist psychoanalytic literary scholar”), whose condescension and all-white reading lists made it glaringly clear that they didn’t feel the need to listen to what Black people, including Sharpe, now a professor of Black studies at York University in Toronto, had to say. She would start to talk and then press the thumbs of both hands to her larynx as the rest of her fingers circled the back of her neck - a movement so involuntary that it didn’t even register in her consciousness until someone asked her why she was doing it. It was a gesture that, as Christina Sharpe puts it, amounted to “self-strangulation.” She was a graduate student in English when it emerged.
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