Colour As Contagion
How does the Western suppression of vibrant colour reflect broader attempts to control bodies, cultures, and histories?
In his seminal book ‘What Color is the Sacred?’ anthropologist Michael Taussig traces how colour entered Western consciousness through imperial trade routes. He interrogates the cultural meaning of colour, revealing how deeply intertwined it is with Western histories of empire, power, and othering.
Taussig argues that in colonial discourse, colour became code for the “exotic” other, non-Western, sensual, and uncontrolled. He links this to the Spanish word calor—heat—suggesting that colour is a visceral, embodied experience, long viewed with suspicion by European rationalism.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Indian textiles and spices entered the European marketplace through the British East India Company. These vibrant colours collided with the drab hues of Northern Europe. This wasn’t just an economic transaction—it was an aesthetic awakening.
In England, these textiles were often dismissed by contemporaries as mere “rags” or “trash,” the colours were derided as vulgar and excessive. Across Europe, bright hues were frequently associated with degeneracy and cultural inferiority.
The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously remarked that “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.”
In contrast, he claimed, “people of refinement” deliberately avoided intense or “pathological” colours, signaling a deep-seated cultural hierarchy tied to chromatic taste. Western culture could not accept colour on its own terms.
As Taussig notes, the West’s discomfort with colour stems from its association with “the primitive”, with the sensory, the bodily, the emotional, the feminine. Colour was dangerous—both morally and politically—because it signalled difference. In what remains one of Taussig’s most incisive observations, he writes: “The Western experience of Colonialism is colored OTHERNESS.”
This aesthetic ideology reveals itself most clearly in the architecture of empire. The white, neoclassical buildings that dominate the West are no coincidence — they are instruments of imperial design.
After 1492, the Spanish Crown ordered colonial officials to destroy Indigenous temples and replace them with European structures. Classical Greco-Roman architecture became the blueprint of dominance: cold symmetry and sterile whiteness displacing the complex, colourful, sacred forms of the Americas.
This erasure was not only spatial—it was also spiritual, visual, and ideological. Europe sought to impose “order” on what it perceived as the chaos of Indigenous life, suppressing its vibrant aesthetics in the process.
Ironically, even the Greco-Roman statues revered by the West were never meant to be white. Ancient sculptures were originally painted in vivid hues—blues, reds, golds. The myth of pristine white marble was a Renaissance fabrication, later co-opted by fascist ideologues who appropriated these monuments of idealised beauty as symbols of white superiority.
In contemporary culture, this aesthetic legacy endures in subtler yet pervasive ways. Minimalist design, quiet luxury, and neutral tones are widely celebrated as markers of refinement, sophistication, and elevated taste. However, beneath this polished surface, minimalism often functions as a coded language—a signifier of class, restraint, and ultimately, whiteness itself.