Sensible Redistributions: Racial Justice and Aesthetic Activism in Chicago

• In Event: What Are the Aesthetics of Justice?

Abstract

My paper explores aesthetic dimensions of struggles for racial justice in Chicago. Racial injustice has always been bound up with aesthetics. Indeed, as David Lloyd (2018) has argued, European aesthetic discourses played a central role in the constitution of a modern “racial regime” that unequally distributes legal rights and privileges. In turn, advocates for racial justice have employed “aesthetic activism” (Nixon 2011) to challenge “distributions of the sensible” (Rancière 2004) that sustain racial hierarchies and distinctions. Thus, for instance, the stated aim of organizers of a recent march protesting gun violence in Chicago was to “redistribute the pain.” How, though, does the aesthetic redistribution of sensibilities interact with redistributions of structural resources (and suffering) usually associated with social justice? What would it mean, furthermore, for aesthetics itself, that is, aesthetic concepts and practices, to be rendered more just? Reflecting on these and related questions, I compare the aesthetic concepts and strategies of several writers, artists, activists and policymakers working for racial justice in Chicago.

Author

• Kam Shapiro, Illinois State University