Lida Zeitlin-Wu

This book tracks the transformation of color from an ephemeral concept into a sophisticated technology, beginning with nineteenth-century mass standardization and culminating in today’s privatized digital landscape. Moving chronologically through six distinct visual paradigms—the wheel, the grid, the domestic interior, the computer interface, the Pantone color swatch, and the digital filter—it reveals how color adapts to shifting cultural and economic contexts to the benefit of corporate capitalism and white supremacy. Yet this is not a top-down process: instead, color also represents a portal to “the good life” in the United States, where color is used to sell ourselves to ourselves. This phenomenon, termed chromatic capitalism, highlights the interplay between hyper-rationalization and the promises of self-fulfillment and subjectivity that come from the wielding of color as a technology at scale. Ultimately, the book offers a new interdisciplinary method for studying color across media forms applicable to a wide range of historical contexts. It also points to a larger tension in the history of capitalism and consumer culture: between the often-invisible technical norms that govern the world people move in and the promises of emotional and aesthetic fulfillment that are dangled in front of the people and indefinitely foreclosed.