Colour Turn

Loske, Alexandra, and Sarah Lowengard. The Book of Colour Concepts. Köln: TASCHEN, 2024

Susanne Marschall — 2025-06-17

Abstract not applicable.

Kind(s) of Blue: The poetics and politics of blueness in Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and Lorna Simpson’s Ghost Note and Time

Elpida Ziavra — 2025-06-17

This paper explores the chromapolitics of the colour blue as it becomes manifest in Dionne Brand’s long prose poem The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2018) and Lorna Simpson’s unsettling and terribly beautiful portraits Ghost Note (2021) and Time (2021). Brand’s poem is articulated as a dialogical sequence between an author and a blue Clerk in a blue coat, who acts as a metonymical figure for the blueness of ink, the sky, the sea, indigo, the night, the blues, and the connection of blue with melancholy. The two characters discuss writing (especially of poetry), the violence of colonial discourses, the histories of dispossession and race thinking, but also the unsaid and unwritten stories of Black communities’ resistance and survival. Simpson’s large-scale ink screenprints juxtapose blue, black, violet, and grey to frame and impress the photographic portraits of women whose fragmented bodies and blueblack flesh persist and survive as counterarchives despite the violence and expropriation of modernity, from the Middle Passage to slavery and the long durée of racisms in the North American context. The Blue Clerk, Ghost Note, and Time confront the lacunae and absences of the colonial archive and deconstruct the monolithic grammars of reading and looking at the colour blue, which obscure the polyvocality of its hues, shades, textures, and relations to adjacent colours—and mainly the colour black. Both the poetic and visual texts perform and incarnate an otherwise, paraontological gaze on blueness, blackness, and the spectres that they conjure in our precarious now-time.

Keywords: blue, black, chromapolitics, counterarchive, paraontology

Worlding in Victorian children's literature: Reading colours in selected texts

Athira Mohan — 2025-06-17

This paper attempts to discuss and analyse colour in Victorian children’s literature, with a specific axis to addressing systems of inequality and subjugation, including wielding a postcolonial lens. I propose to do that by borrowing a concept from the postcolonial theory laid down by Spivak, the theory of worlding. It refers to how the colonised space is refashioned and remodelled for the native by the coloniser. Although the native is familiar with their birthplace, the refashioning works through processes such as cartography, travelling, and writing. A similar process happens through pedagogy as well, which continues as an invisible form of colonisation. Children’s narratives have always been a strong weapon for worlding, as I try to illustrate through the paper. Worlding is an appropriate concept to be applied to the genre of children’s literature, as the space has been designed and historically used for constructing the child’s world. Through inspecting selected narratives of Victorian children’s fiction, I look at the role of colour in the process of worlding, and how it manifests as different experiences for the genders.

Keywords: colour studies, Victorian age, gender, race, imperialism.

Colour Reflections: A study of colour in cinema using the example of Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite

Susanne Marschall — 2025-06-18

In this text I seek to connect the perception (aisthesis) of colour as a phenomenon of our mind with the design (aesthetics) of colour in cinema. In a methodological excursus, I relate the complexity of the formal-aesthetic device ‘colour’ to a taxonomy of film research developed by myself, which I call the KinematoGramm. The model of the KinematoGramm constitutes the starting point of an extensive publication project and is presented here for discussion for the first time in English in combination with an analysis of the lighting and colour dramaturgy as well as the visual aesthetics of Parasite. Parasite is a 2019 film by South Korean director Bong Joon-ho which was not only internationally acclaimed but also won four Academy Awards in 2020 (Best Film, Best International Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay). Based on the carefully created, nuanced green-primed colour palette of Joon-ho’s socio-critical parable, the intermingling of two incompatible milieus unfolds as a differential quality of colours, textures, and materials. The consequences of this transgression of social and economic boundaries are fatal.

Keywords: film studies, kinematogramm, colour and light, cultural context, production studies, technical analyses, Parasite

When my student asked Was ist Black auf Deutsch: Deconstructing racial terminology in language courses

Anna Wells Piotti Castonguay — 2025-06-17

There is a tendency to use colour terminology to stratify certain sociocultural communities. Colours map inexactly onto skin tones and have become identity markers that language users apply to themselves and to others. In my home culture and in my first language, we often use the term race for these colour appellations. When asked about my race, I respond with White; I have friends who would respond with Black. Yet colour terms (e.g., black and white) and racial identities (e.g., Black and White) hold different meanings for different people, even within a single language. Our understandings of colours and identities come from aggregated chance encounters with contexts, constructed across collective and personal experiences. This paper has emerged from a single line of questioning, one posed by a student in my German-language classroom, and the challenge I faced in answering. “Was ist Black auf Deutsch?” How does one effectively translate this everyday word? This paper is the multi-year musing galvanised by that class period and the various translations one could consider. I ultimately support an honest, contextualised, critical approach and pose a series of questions to guide instructor colleagues towards their own teaching of racial- and colour-based language.

Keywords: language learning, language teaching, race, colour, German