Culture of Yellow : Or, The Visual Politics of Late Modernity

Abstract

This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during the period 1890-1990 primarily as a color of stigma and scandal. Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Though scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the ‘yellow nineties’), the rise of mass media (‘yellow journalism’), mass immigration from Asia (‘the yellow peril’), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany). The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literature,

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