Christina Sharpe on John Keene’s Counternarratives

Christina Sharpe (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to rave about 2018 Fiction prize-winner John Keene’s Counternarratives. They discuss the pleasures of Keene’s playful prose and his deep engagement with stirring questions of truth and history.

For a full episode transcript, click here.

*

Reading list: 

Counternarratives by John Keene • Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe • A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain • James by Percival Everett • Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison • The Awakening by Kate Chopin

From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I’m really excited to talk about [Counternarratives]. I mean, this I would say is in my top five of like all the books that I’ve read in 12 years on the prizes. It’s just such, I think a kind of towering achievement among contemporary writers. And so, it was great to reread it again. I’m curious, like what, what is it about this book that made you want to talk about it?

Christina Sharpe: You know, I love this book, I think from the first time I read it in 2015, and I feel like, I practically proselytize in relation to this book. Like, you haven’t read counter narratives, you have to read counter narratives, you have to read it. I think it is such a, a book that really, if I think about a book that really deals with African diaspora from, you know, I guess 17th century, 16th century, to the present, or at least the 20th century, if not the 21st century. Just the writing, it’s formally inventive. It’s, um, deeply knowing it’s intertextual. It’s funny, it’s beautifully written, um, like conceptually and again, formally daring. It just does so much work. I often teach it and I think about Counternarratives and A Map to the Door of No Return as two works that do a deep kind of diasporic work and are both formally inventive, beautifully written, and push us to know things differently