Color Protocols

An edited volume that explores how color intersects with problematic histories of racial encoding in linguistic, visual, and algorithmic media.

What is at stake when categories like color, race, and ethnicity are transformed into a common language, lexicon, or industry standard? And more critically, how can we avoid the epistemic and ontological violence that seems inevitable in organizing color into a series of grammars, syntaxes, indexes, and protocols? Color Protocols offers a series of responses to these questions and others. It begins with the premise that color is central to the history of systemic racism, and in turn, that the encoding of race vis-à-vis color is an intrinsic aspect of chromatic technologies.

The book’s eighteen curated essays, edited by Carolyn Kane and Lida Zeitlin-Wu, are written by scholars from across the arts, social sciences, and humanities. Each section contains both original essays and republished excerpts fundamental to understanding how the history of color technology and its racialized double-valences have played out across multiple fields and media platforms over the last century and a half.


Contributors: Ruha Benjamin, Jianqing Chen, Anne Anlin Cheng, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Dyer, Ali Feser, Nicholas Gaskill, Quran M. Karriem, Michael Keevak, Lisa Nakamura, Tina Post, Aileen Robinson, Michael Rossi, Lorna Roth, Amber Sweat, Genevieve YueIntroduction Color Codes
Part I. Grammars
Introduction Color Encoding from the Enlightenment to “Race Science”
1 The Color Line
Frederick Douglass
2 The Souls of Black Folk and The Superior Race (An Essay)
W. E. B. DuBois
3 Like a Color: Chromatic Metaphors in the Grammar of Race
Nicholas Gaskill
4 Measuring Skin Color and The Color Top
Michael Keevak
5 Pigment and Plaster: Anthropomorphizing Informatic Color in Hawai’i, 1921
Michael Rossi
6 Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman
Anne Anlin Cheng
Part II Images
Introduction Images: Lighting for Whiteness in the Moving Image
7 “Black Art:” Light, Magic, and the Racial Techniques of Innovation
Aileen Robinson
8 The Light of the World
Richard Dyer
9 Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity
Lorna Roth
10 The China Girl on the Margins of Film
Genevieve Yue
11 Making Fantasy Material: Kodachrome, Eugenics, and the Chemoaesthetics of Racial Capitalism
Ali Feser
12 Advantage Black: Hyperblackness in Performative Self-Portraiture
Tina Post
Part III Algorithms
13 Head-Hunting on the Internet: Identity Tourism, Avatars, and Racial Passing in Textual and Graphic Chat Spaces
Lisa Nakamura
14 Coded Exposure
Ruha Benjmain
15 Whose White Baby is That?: Colors of Cyborgian Youth and “Good” Mixed-Race Algorithms
Amber Sweat
16 Yellow Women’s White Faces in Chinese Little-Fresh Selfies
Jianqing Chen
17 Algorithmic Images and Recursive Epidermalization
Quran M. Karriem
18 Cybertypes Twenty Years Later: Lisa Nakamura talks with Lida Zeitlin-Wu
Author Biographies
IndexCarolyn L. Kane is Professor in the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Chromatic Algorithms and Electrographic Architecture.

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is completing a book titled How Color Became a Technology.