Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Research on colors is often directed to emotional associations to different colors and how perception of
colors affects behavior and emotional states. Colors also appear to be considered as, in part informed by the
above, appropriate when addressing issues about emotions and conduct with children, both in popular
culture and educational settings. Through the use of colors as signs, children should adjust behavior and
emotional states, and even identify with being a members of color categories based on personal traits. This
paper takes departure in an understanding of colors and emotions as charged with cultural meaning and
examines the use of colors in three cases: a Swedish book Tilda of ice and sun, directed to pre-school
children, addressing the prevention of bullying; Step-by-Step, an educational programme for social and
emotional learning; and “Constructive leadership in the classroom”, a material for teachers. It will explore
children’s popular culture and education as arenas where culturally colored categories are established and
colors are used as normalizing tools, for “the conduct of conduct” and the instilling of children’s emotional
self-regulation.
Jennifer Daryl Slack* & Stefka Hristova Cultures In-Color
While color has been an object of study in the arts, philosophy, psychology, and race studies, it warrants a
different kind of interrogation in conversation with cultural studies. Culture is always in-color, a concept that
acknowledges that cultures enact a double articulation to different concepts of color and color relations –
sometimes understood as, but not limited to, “color systems” – and to specific uses and affects of colors.
Evidence of the power of color and colors draws on what color “is,” both as conveyed through accessible and
explicit explanations, but more importantly as lived. Access to lived relations of color is best achieved
through examining moments in popular culture where those relations “fail,” such as in the 2015 controversy,
TheDress. Rethinking color in this way provides a basis for understanding the subtle and not so subtle ways
that resistance to difference is reproduced. It also suggests strategies for contesting that resistance.
Malini Sur
The Blue Urban: Colors of Contestation in 21st Century Kolkata
As urban re-development in India focuses on rebuilding old urban centers and designing smart cities, color
offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetics of political power. In eastern India, Kolkata’s ruling political
party has mobilized the color blue in a concerted effort to glamorize the urban fabric by referencing big
urban ambitions, corporate capital and cheerfulness. Political opponents, however, assert that as a state
imposed color, blue, limits aesthetic freedom and makes the city un-alluring. This essay intends to transcend
this binary. I argue that blue disrupts the city’s chromatic past under the previous Left front rule associated
color red, by gathering momentum as a political force that embraces and excludes ordinary city dwellers.
State incorporation of blue, that cleverly blurs the margins of public planning and real estate investments,
undoes the city’s chromatic histories through a close correspondence between state blues (colors of
government offices, public infrastructures, urban barricades and lattices), corporate blues (promising
affluent residential living) and the widespread use of blue as an everyday urban color (for shutters, cans,
tarpaulin and corrugated boundary walls). Following blue’s differing shades, patterns and textures in public
spaces, heritage elite residences, construction sites, new housing blocks and slums, I show how landed
families, resettled artisans and squatters willingly embrace blue as a color of hope and inclusion, as well as
situate it as an exclusionary force in a city whose new vistas keep out the urban poor.
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