Coloring Feelings: Concept Books Making and Remaking Racialized Color Meanings
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Coloring Feelings: Concept Books Making and Remaking Racialized Color Meanings Gretchen Papazian1 Accepted: 12 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Working with cognitive literary theory, affect theory, semiotics, and recent picturebook scholarship, this essay looks at the ways the concept book (as a subtype of the picturebook format) connects color to emotion. In doing so, it suggests that one of Western culture’s most commonly accepted ideas of color and color meaning may contribute to ongoing social inequities and injustices. The essay identifies a set of techniques the concept book uses to attach emotion meaning to color, highlighting that such connections are not merely embodied within concept books, but they are also nurtured by them. As the essay also re-introduces “nurture” into cognitive studies literary scholarship, it suggests that, while the innate, cognitive brain structure of schema and script might be immutable, the content of those structures is flexible and therein offers possibility for change. This possibility is in fact itself embodied in a small but growing body of concept books that seem to resist and push back against conventional, emotionalized color meaning, leaving meaning potentials open and promoting cognitive flexibility by engaging empathy. Keywords Color · Emotion · Concept Books · Picturebooks · Picture Books · Cognitive Studies · Theory of Mind · Affect Theory · Semiotics · Empathy · Racism · Diversity
Gretchen Papazian is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses in children’s, young adult, American, and diversity literatures. Her published works include a coedited collection of essays on video game adaptations, as well as essays on emotion and nineteenthcentury sentimental novels; African-American mothering in picturebooks; child agency and video games; Early Readers and reading; and diversity picturebooks and their uses of color. * Gretchen Papazian [email protected] 1
Central Michigan University, Anspach Hall 208, Mt Pleasant, MI 48859, USA
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Children’s Literature in Education
Molly Bang’s Sophie is angry (Fig. 1)—she is really, really angry. We see this immediately in the book cover’s close-up display of a child’s face, eyebrows low and close, nostrils flared, mouth grim. We see it immediately in the semiotic connections Bang generates between the flat red of the background behind Sophie’s face, in the red border that edges three sides of the book, in the one red square in the middle of the striping that wraps the book’s bound edge, and in the red, typographic synesthesia of the book’s title: When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry…. The title itself draws attention to Sophie’s anger in its choppy grammar, in its repetition of words, and in its layout—especially its stacked “angry.” To put a fine point on it: Bang’s 1999 Caldecott Honor book, Jane Adams Honor Book, and Charlotte Zolotow Award winner is obviously and emphatically about emotion. In this, it invites both feeling and considera
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