In his essay Black Op, Fred Moten claims that “[B]lack studies is the critique of Western Civilization” (Moten, 2008:1). However, fully grasping the theoretical charge of Moten’s clause requires a few points of departure: What is Black political thought, what is Western civilization, and how might we envision or understand the interstices of that critique?

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Christina Sharpe uses Moten’s statement to develop a framework for thinking through Black political thought and Western civilization. In her book In the Wake, Sharpe argues that the status quo is genealogically entangled with slavery, which is evidenced by the reality that Black lives in the diaspora are subject to “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Sharpe, 2016:15). If Sharpe refers to this genealogy as “the wake,” then “wake work” is what she posits as a mode of praxis in the struggle against Black subordination. Wake work consists of salvaging Black aesthetic projects to understand how their creators deepen the contradictions of civil sociality, imagine novel ways of caring for each other, and ultimately speculate new living strategies beyond our present (Sharpe, 2016:14). Observing one such piece of Black art, Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, allows for an elaborated understanding of Moten’s claim; Ellison’s story embodies Sharpe’s praxis of wake work by underscoring the importance of deepening the contradictions of post-emancipation society and attending to the deceased through methods of care. As a result, Ellison elucidates how our present is constitutive of a historical genealogy in which Black lives endure through and against the undelivered legal promise of liberty, freedom, and equality. 

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Ellison reveals his alignment with wake work by contending with the various contradictions that characterize post-reconstruction atrocities. In the words of Saidiya Hartman, Black life in slavery’s aftermath is contoured with the paradox of being “emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior” (Hartman, 2019:205). In particular, Ellison problematizes one specific paradox between scientific and historical study as they relate to a telos of “progress.” As Brother Jack indoctrinates the narrator of Invisible Man into the brotherhood, he suggests that “[the dead] are powerless to give the full answer to the new questions posed for the living by history. …  Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed and changed by the people … There is a scientific explanation for this” (Ellison, 1952:306-307). Brother Jack’s political strategy for creating “change” privileges ideas like the scientific method as the primary tool for political action, yet discounts and excludes Black histories. Yet under a broader scope, Ellison engages in wake work here by exposing how political movements in the advent of emancipation are remarkably prone to isolating Black histories as a necessary opportunity cost to produce social achievement. As a result, Ellison unveils and problematizes the various registers through which Black life, while guaranteed the benefits of citizenship and liberal individualism, is repeatedly and paradoxically displaced toward civil society’s peripheral zones. 

Ellison additionally exemplifies Sharpe’s methodology by speculating and illuminating the contours of what it means to attend to the deceased. In particular, the narrator’s drive to organize a funeral for Brother Clifton and deliver a speech in his memory embodies an essential aspect of wake work. In his monologue, the narrator highlights how Clifton died because “he thought he was a man and that men were not meant to be pushed around. But it was hot downtown and he forgot his history, he forgot the time and place” (Ellison, 1952:457). Here, the narrator carves a path through and against the terrors of Clifton's extrajudicial killing by clarifying the architectural social terrain that produced Clifton’s death. Put differently, Ellison envisions wake work by imagining a response to police brutality that forwards Black subjugation as a constitutive aspect of civil society. By beginning from that vantage, Ellison’s narrator reveals how enslavement’s historical semiotics persist through a genealogical relationship to the present. In turn, he conceives a critical premise of “wake work” – that Blackness in the present is characterized by insisting "to mourn lives meant to be unmournable and live lives meant to be unlivable" (Sharpe, 2016:19) involves an understanding that the status quo is still unfolding in the aftermath of slavery. 

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By exemplifying two specific strains of Christina Sharpe's praxis of wake work – deepening the contradictions undergirding civil society and attendance toward the dead – Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man embodies Fred Moten’s conception of Black political thought by illuminating how Western civilization is still dealing with the catastrophe of slavery. At stake, thus, is a reconsideration of how salvaging the archive of Black aesthetic works is a necessary, not sufficient, condition for developing a praxis of living beyond the confines of a status quo that insists upon the subjugation of Black life.