Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media

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 Yue

Carolyn 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.