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226 Leonardo Reviews hand the material observation that the meaning of color is “relative” (that is, dependent on more than just the dye of a given item), and on the other hand the social and democratic claim for “democracy” (that is, the permanent negotiation of the way we accept to live not just next to other people but really with them). The both moral and political lesson of the book, which contains an explicit praise of John Dewey, one of the masterminds behind instruction at Black Mountain College, where Joseph Albers was to develop his color pedagogy (see his book Interaction of Color, 1963), is then summarized in the following quote: “Thinking in situations is a way of reading relativity without falling into mere relativism. This is a hard task—sometimes I think it is the hard task, the one that postmodernism got wrong and pragmatism gets right” (p. 246). Gaskill develops his historical reconstruction of the “meaning” of color in American culture and literature (in that order, for literature is more a testing ground than a starting point) around five major moments and works, starting in the 1880s and ending in the 1930s: (1) the attempts of authors such as Hamlin Garland, these days incorrectly discarded as an example of regionalism, to transfer Impressionist ideas on color to the domain of writing—or more precisely to invent new ways of writing inspired by impressionist techniques of manipulating colors in order to obtain a sharper and increased perception of “local colors,” that is, of colors localized on specific parts of the canvas; (2) the color descriptions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman that explored the value and impact of tones and dyes regardless of the objects that made them appear and the subsequent tension between figuration and abstraction as well as the growing awareness of the importance of the perceiving body; (3) the spread of colorfully printed children’s books, such as Frank Baum’s 1903 Wonderful Wizard of Oz (with illustrations by Denslow), with their contradictory mix of liberation of the child’s imagination and heavily racialized representations of savages and primitives ; (4) the nonrepresentative use of chromatic vocabularies to artificially produce chromatic feelings and experiences that further distinguish between colors as abstract qualities (as “firsts,” in the terminology of C.S. Peirce) capable of being manipulated outside their materialization in specific objects (in “seconds”), in realist as well as radically avant-garde texts (the respective examples being Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and other writings); and finally (5) the Harlem Renaissance writers blurring the boundaries between color and body, perception and experience, sight and movement, and even more generally art and life. The fundamental idea that unifies all these often remarkable and always very clever analyses is the belief in and progressive critique of the teleological relationship between color perception and sensibility on the one hand and the growth and construction of the modern subject on the other hand (Gaskill also develops the Darwinist aspects, pro and contra, that contemporary thinkers used to link with this kind of belief). Color does not have the same meaning for children and adults, and whatever one’s color preferences may be (I will come back to the controversy on “primitivism”), it is generally accepted that the color-sense has to be trained in order to achieve a better use of color in all phases of life. Gaskill scrupulously examines the explicit and implicit aspects of this conviction as well as its impact on education, business, culture and art, while reading no less carefully first the growing unease with the ideological underpinnings of this belief and second the emergence of models of thinking of color that explicitly rejected the refusal of less rational aspects of the color experience such as the body, emotion, affect and more in general the preference given to chromatic and existential “riot” (a metaphor of the blending what traditional Western thinking tries to keep apart). Chromographia is an essential publication, which I think will have a lasting impact on the cultural and interdisciplinary study of literature. It is an exceptionally well-crafted study that demonstrates the possibility of a merger between literary...

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