Description
Book SynopsisHow fluorescent orange symbolizes the uneven distribution of safety and risk in the neoliberal United States
Safety Orange first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard in technical manuals and federal regulations in the United States. Today it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. In recent decades, the color has become ubiquitous in American public life—a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented saturation encodes the tracking of those bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures judged as worthy of care—and those deemed dangerous and expendable.
Here, Anna Watkins Fisher uses Safety Orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in twenty-first-century U.S. public life and for pondering what the color tells us about neoliberalism’s intensifying impact often hiding in plain sight in ordinary and commonplace phenomena.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Trade Review"In an age when so many books of aesthetic and critical theory feel not only dense but several degrees removed from things that matter in daily life, Safety Orange stands apart. It’s a convincing kind of argument that makes you see things differently, be they artworks, the United States, or urban detritus on your daily walk."—Art in America
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Ordinary Life on High Alert
1. Orange You Glad You Live in America: The United States of Perpetual Risk
2. Orange beyond Orange: Normalizing Catastrophe in Public Risk Communication
3. An Infrastructural Band-Aid: Outsourcing State Accountability
4. Orange Is the New Profiling Technology
5. Orange Applied: Artistic Appropriations
Conclusion: Seeing Red
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
