The Lie at the Center of Everything

Abstract

In The Lie at the Center of Everything, Christina Sharpe reads Valerie Martin s 2003 Orange Prize winning novel Property for the ways that it positions readers, across race, to enter into the narrative through the consciousness of the white slave-owning woman Manon Gaudet. Sharpe traces the ways that such positioning locates many readers in the inability to see (or hear) black suffering, locates them as unable to see or account for the matter of race; specifically the lived experience of the black.