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title: "Notes on Nicholas Gaskill's Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color"
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Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, _Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), [originally a Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1422458629555433487).

This morning, I am kicking off by reading Nicholas Gaskill's "Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color". Amusingly, I'm reading it on an e-reading device. In black and white.

pp 1-2 details Milton Bradley's color wheel for optical color mixing; translates from the strange names of colors on the market ("elephant's breath") to specific hues 

p3: He also instigated a programme of colour education for school children 

pp4-5 details some very dubious anthropological experiments where the wheel was used to discern whether non-white Europeans perceived color in more "primitive" ways. Eek. 

Gaskill's thesis on p6: color, developed through synthetic dyes, is central to modernity. It is "an essential part of what it meant to feel and be modern -- or, by contrast, 'primitive' -- in the United States in the decades between 1880 and 1930". 

My note: OK, but I'm going to need some persuading of this, given the long history of synthetic color. 

p7: details emergence of relational model of color experience; proliferation of synthetic dyes; and formulation of a distinct "color sense" 

p7: this book will focus on "inscriptions of color in writing" (chromographia) that document "the activity of narrating color experience" 

p8 gives a background to history of color perception and the development of a relational understanding (it isn't how much red you put on that makes it redder, it's the ratio of red to other hues, and particularly, white) 

p9: color came to be regarded as a distinctive force with identifiable effects on the body and emotions p10: the obligatory reference to John Locke and primary and secondary qualities 

p13 has more on emergent educational contexts for children around color perception and understanding 

p14 quotes George R. Stewart Jr. as saying that the discovery in 1856 of phenylphenosafranine for mauve dye will be "one of the most important events in the history of poetry during the nineteenth century"

(With thanks to @becimay - this is actually what put me on to this book) also reminds me, of course, of Ben Blatt's /NABOKOV'S FAVORITE WORD IS MAUVE/

pp15-16 claims that synthetic color production -- and color naming -- gave rise to a vastly expanded linguistic resource pool for color description 

p17 documents proliferation of bright commercial products. Again, I have some questions about how this is different or intensified vs other earlier historical periods 

p 19 - documents via Batchelor an oscillation in the West between chromophilia (utopian visions of color ecstasy) and chromophobia (fears of colorful excess and moral decadence) p19 also points to how the extraction of color from natural substances -- such as coal tar -- further erased the natural/synthetic distinction 

p20: claims that invention of aniline changed the referent of "color" from a sensory property of natural objects to, at end of 19c, "the artificial means of manipulating and exaggerating chromatic quality as an abstract entity" 

p20 has the reference to Pynchon's /GRAVITY'S RAINBOW/ that I thought was coming. "The first new color on Earth", linked to totalizing systems of the war and the Holocaust. One of the phrases rolling around my head re. some of these claims is "modernist exceptionalism" 

p 21 has some examples of Modernist color symbolism in Pound H.D. and Wallace Stevens. Still not convinced about the specificity of all this to modernism. 

pp22-24 details how sensitivity to color perception became a "badge of civilization" in various dodgy anthropological contexts pp24-25 does go into the scholarship that has claimed that Homer, for instance, describes color in a very different way to later poetry 

p26 - the biological explanation of supposedly superior color perception organs was refuted by Wallace and Grant Allen 

p30 - on racialized versions of color perception in the 19c, based on Lamarckian models of the sensing body p31 has a crucial point for Gaskill. He writes that "Color became modernist only against a background of color perception becoming historical". I.e. when color becomes socially and historically contingent, it becomes "modern" 

p35 gestures towards Huxley and Kristeva's "Giotto's Joy" as important for the language of color sensation p43 registers shift in idiom of "local color" from a term in painting to the meaning of "local culture" 

p45 introduces Hamlin Garland as the subject of this chapter and a writer of "local color"