Rebekah Modrak: Praxis Center Features “Rethink Shinola”

Stamps Associate Professor Rebekah Modrak’s Rethink Shinola was recently featured by the Praxis Center, an online resource center for scholars, activists, and artists hosted by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College.

RETHINK SHINOLA is a multi-part, Internet-based artwork analyzing and critiquing the branding messages publicized by the company Shinola, founded in 2011. Shinola’s name is ​“a nod” to the former Shinola, a shoe polish company that promoted its products using racist caricatures of African Americans. The ​“new” Shinola company planted itself in Detroit and leverages and profiteers from the extreme conditions and image of the city as a site of grit and resilience. The brand creates representations of patriarchal whiteness to enforce perceptions of their ​“leadership” and circulates images of African American employees being grateful for this so-called governance. In Shinola’s narratives, the ​“wild” Detroit environment needs a civilized savior who can first identify with and then tame and civilize the savage.

http://​www​.kzoo​.edu/​p​r​a​x​i​s​/​r​e​t​h​i​n​k​-​s​h​i​nola/