Sue Shon | Emily Carr University of Art and Design (original) (raw)

Papers by Sue Shon

Exhibition essay for Lucie Chan: How to Be 57 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC; September 3 - Oct... more Exhibition essay for Lucie Chan: How to Be 57 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC; September 3 - October 1, 2022.

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 2022

On November 30th, 2022, JCRI convened a roundtable conversation with critical race scholars Sue S... more On November 30th, 2022, JCRI convened a roundtable conversation with critical race scholars Sue Shon, Vidya Shah, Deanna Reder, and Jules Gill-Peterson to discuss Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a personal and theoretical orientation. Moderated by Juliane Okot-Bitek and Kesha Fevrier, the conversation explored CRT’s personal and theoretical resonance, how to understand the intersections of recent attacks on CRT in relation to other forms of violence and attacks on people’s bodily dignity, and how scholars and educators might best respond to the challenges of the present moment.

Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2022

Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity... more Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance.

Media N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2022

Runaway slave newspaper advertisements constitute some of the earliest visual formulations of sup... more Runaway slave newspaper advertisements constitute some of the earliest visual formulations of supposedly legible racial meaning in the Americas. Numbering in the thousands, these missing persons reports contain rare pre-photographic portrayals of self-emancipated individuals “seen” by a public. By reading the advertisements with and against the grain, this essay explores the logic of seeing in these early forms of racial profiling and speculates about how descriptive language makes race feel as if it is and ought to be visible and transparent to the beholder. Racial visibility was and is produced by the layers of abstraction undertaken to represent what could already be recognized as “racial” in public culture and affirms a perceptual experience I call racial sense. A theory of racial sense is developed in this essay by reading Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic philosophy alongside Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the human. This theory of racial sense challenges the distinction between aesthetics and science as staged by the modern project of the human.

American Literature, 2017

Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and ... more Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen's novel.

Exhibition essay for Lucie Chan: How to Be 57 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC; September 3 - Oct... more Exhibition essay for Lucie Chan: How to Be 57 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC; September 3 - October 1, 2022.

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 2022

On November 30th, 2022, JCRI convened a roundtable conversation with critical race scholars Sue S... more On November 30th, 2022, JCRI convened a roundtable conversation with critical race scholars Sue Shon, Vidya Shah, Deanna Reder, and Jules Gill-Peterson to discuss Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a personal and theoretical orientation. Moderated by Juliane Okot-Bitek and Kesha Fevrier, the conversation explored CRT’s personal and theoretical resonance, how to understand the intersections of recent attacks on CRT in relation to other forms of violence and attacks on people’s bodily dignity, and how scholars and educators might best respond to the challenges of the present moment.

Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2022

Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity... more Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance.

Media N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2022

Runaway slave newspaper advertisements constitute some of the earliest visual formulations of sup... more Runaway slave newspaper advertisements constitute some of the earliest visual formulations of supposedly legible racial meaning in the Americas. Numbering in the thousands, these missing persons reports contain rare pre-photographic portrayals of self-emancipated individuals “seen” by a public. By reading the advertisements with and against the grain, this essay explores the logic of seeing in these early forms of racial profiling and speculates about how descriptive language makes race feel as if it is and ought to be visible and transparent to the beholder. Racial visibility was and is produced by the layers of abstraction undertaken to represent what could already be recognized as “racial” in public culture and affirms a perceptual experience I call racial sense. A theory of racial sense is developed in this essay by reading Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic philosophy alongside Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the human. This theory of racial sense challenges the distinction between aesthetics and science as staged by the modern project of the human.

American Literature, 2017

Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and ... more Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen's novel.