Christina Sharpe is the winner of the Hodler Prize 001 for Ordinary Notes
Christina Sharpe is the winner of the Hodler Prize 001 for Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A text composed of fragments, which posits blackness as absolutely fundamental and central to understanding the relations of domination and power at work in our societies, whatever the dominant and the dominated.
Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—named by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2016—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities, at York University, in Toronto.
It's customary for the debates to have been contentious, the choice painful, even stormy, but this moment of deliberation with the jury was a pure moment of happiness, unanimous enthralling and exciting.
The jury was keen to reward a book that commands respect for both its factual and formal approach, with a construction based on small touches that succeeds in bringing the reader to the heart of a monumental work without him or her even realizing it.
Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
The prize money for the Hodler Prize is 1 Bitcoin, divided equally between Christina Sharpe and the jury, i.e. 0.1 Bitcoin per person.
We can't thank the jury enough for this wonderful discussion, Martin Bethenod, Emanuele Coccia, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Chelsea Manning, Rachel Monroe, Tolu Ogunlesi, Diego Ongaro, Adli Takkal Bataille and Vanessa Walters.
And our partners Ledger, Paymium and TradeTogether
As well as our early supporters for their enthusiasm Cryptoast, l’Hôtel Grand Amour, Bitstack, l’ADAN, the Superostudio for the graphic design and Brognon-Rollin for artwork.
We're proud to have assembled such a brilliant, inquisitive and benevolent jury, to remake the world at the Grand Amour Hotel, in the heart of this cosmopolitan 10th arrondissement of Paris, at the center of this Europe, which is inventing a unique, historic political model every day, where 27 nations have agreed to lose a piece of sovereignty to design a new common space.
The Hodler Prize is open to all published texts, set to image or music, since text is the common space par excellence, provided it is aided by a little translation.
The texts in competition are in English, the most open discussion space available to us since the failure of Esperanto and the leniency of our English and American friends who let us speak broken English.
Last but not least, the prize money is in bitcoin, a new common monetary space, yet another historic experiment, ideally open to all, whose time will test the new values it can instill in our fragmented societies.
In stock market jargon, every minute is a battle between the Bears, the pessimistic capable of bringing the market down with a swipe of their paws, and the Bulls, the optimistic who send prices hurtling towards the moon.
The adage goes that being bearish makes you look smart, but being bullish makes you rich. Needless to say, we're decidedly bullish. After this deliberation, we all left a little richer. After reading Christina Sharp's Ordinary Note, you'll continue your journey as an immensely richer eater of ideas.
See you next year for Hodler Prize 002 !