Visual selection highlighting invisible (with Evil and color-theme)

Question

In Emacs color-theme libraries, which items control the visual selection foreground and background?

I'm in the process of giving Emacs a try after many years of Vim use. The vim emulator, Evil, is working imporessively well for me but I'm having trouble with visual selection highlighting. The problem seems to be with my chosen color theme rather than with Evil. I say this because if I comment out the the theme I can see the selected text properly highlighted, but not with my chosen theme which is a port of the ir-black them I use in Vim.

I got the theme from https://github.com/jmdeldin/ir-black-theme.el/blob/master/ir-black-theme.el

Here's the section in my .emacs file that loads Evil and the theme.

;Enable "Evil", the Vim emulation package
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/evil")
(require 'evil)
(evil-mode 1)
(line-number-mode t)

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/color-theme-6.6.0")
(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-initialize)
(color-theme-ir-black)    

I've searched color-theme-ir-black.el for "visual" and find only the following lines that seem possibly relevant.

;;visual selection: #1D1E2C
 (region ((t (:background "#1D1E2C"))))
 (speedbar-file-face ((t (:foreground "#1D1E2C"))))

FWIW, I'm running GNU Emacs 24.4.1 on OS X 10.9.5

Answer 1

You could try

(custom-theme-set-faces 'ir-black
  `(region ((t :background "magenta"))))

in your emacs config somewhere after initializing the theme.