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Color Protocols:
Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media 
(Carolyn L. Kane and Lida Zeitlin-Wu, editors)

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Left:  WorldsAway customizable avatars (c. 1990s); Right: "Shirley Card" test images, Kodak (c. 1970s)

Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025) is a carefully curated selection of essays by scholars across the arts, humanities, and social sciences working at the unexamined intersection of color media and practices of racial encoding, ordering, and classification. The book’s three chronological parts— I. “Grammars,” II. “Images,” and  III. “Algorithms”—reframe pressing issues in critical race studies as they intersect with the history of modern color technologies from the rise of 19th-century "race science" to our informatically-coded digital present.

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