Sharpe, Note 97 (147), in full:
"There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book's explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity... or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they 'bravely' eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.
These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.
These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them."