Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow

Abstract

Abel finds that the original intent of the signs was undermined over time by the constant scrutiny and reinterpretation the signs received as a result of their exhibition in public spaces and in visual culture, until they were finally rendered impotent by the political dismantling of Jim Crow. Yet the study will engage scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary analysis, photography criticism, southern history, cinema studies, and feminist theory.

Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. By Elizabeth Abel. (Berkeley and other cities: University of California Press, c. 2010. Pp. xx, 391. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-520-26183-9; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-520-26117-4.)

Segregation signs typically remind us of a dark period in American history. Yet Elizabeth Abel's Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow significantly iUuminates their existence and social impact. Abel wanted to create a visual "archive" of segregation signs in their original sociocultural context to prevent the initial meaning of these artifacts from "disappearing from cultural memory" (p. xx). As a themed collection of historical photographs, Abel's work is outstanding and similar in nature to James Allen and his colleagues' Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.Mex., 2000), which documents another highly visible and shameful aspect of Jim Crow. However, Abel also wrote the book to convince readers of the connection between segregation signs and what she calls "the more insidious modes and sites of racialization that persist in the twenty-first century" (p. xvii). In my opinion, this significant point needs more development than what is provided in the afterword and constitutes the unfinished business of the book.

Signs of the Times traces the evolution of Jim Crow signs from their inception in the late nineteenth century through their demise in the 1960s and their reinvention as popular items of black memorabilla. Along the way, Abel assesses the social life and "strange career" of segregation signs in three major ways (p. 6). She examines the specific language and rhetorical devices used by the authors of the signs to mark racial difference; she assesses the impact of spatialization on the signs' credibility; and she explores photography's ability to reframe the visual content of the signs in a way that forces viewers to consider die arbitrariness of race. Abel finds that the original intent of the signs was undermined over time by the constant scrutiny and reinterpretation the signs received as a result of their exhibition in public spaces and in visual culture, until they were finally rendered impotent by the political dismantling of Jim Crow. Today, activist collectors accumulate these signs to prove to future generations that segregation actually happened, while entrepreneurs sell cheap, trivialized replicas to the public to capitalize on more prurient interests in matters of race.

A meticulously researched and well-written book, Signs of the Times owes much to previous works, like Nicholas Natanson's The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville, 1992), that have profiled extensively the major photographic collections that Abel has mined so exhaustively. Her images were selected from a body of work created largely between 1930 and 1970 by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration or the Office of War Information during the Great Depression and World War II, respectively, and by photojournalists documenting the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Works by African American photographers were also chosen to demonstrate the specific nature of their "talk back" to the signage, which constituted a unique version of most photographers' systematic employment of irony and parody in their compositions (p. 102).

Signs of the Times is heavily laden with photography criticism and visual theory that may limit the book's appropriateness for general student use. Yet the study will engage scholars in disciplines as diverse as literary analysis, photography criticism, southern history, cinema studies, and feminist theory. It also satisfies a long-standing need in the scholarship on segregation to consider separately but equally the visual aspects of Jim Crow and the perennial issues of political disenfranchisement, economic subjugation, legal segregation, lynching, and other forms of extralegal racial violence.