Signs of the Times traces the career of Jim Crow signs—simplified in cultural memory to the “colored/white” labels that demarcated the public spaces of the American South—from their intellectual and political origins in the second half of the nineteenth century through their dismantling by civil rights activists in the 1960s and ’70s. In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, Elizabeth Abel assembles a variegated archive of segregation signs and photographs that translated a set of regional practices into a national conversation about race. Abel also brilliantly investigates the semiotic system through which segregation worked to reveal how the signs functioned in particular spaces and contexts that shifted the grounds of race from the somatic to the social sphere.

CONTENTS:

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: Jim Crow’s Cultural Turns

Part I. Inscriptions

1. American Graffiti: The Social Life of Jim Crow Signs

2. The Signs of Race in the Language of Photography

3. Cultural Memory and the Conditions of Visibility: The Circulation of Jim Crow Photographs

Part II. Race and Space

4. Restroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Perspective, Mobility, and the Fluid Grounds of Race and Gender

5. The Eyeball and the Wall: Eating, Seeing, and the Nation

Part III. Still and Motion Pictures

6. Double Take: Photography, Cinema, and the Segregated Theater

7. Upside Down and Inside Out: Camera Work, Spectatorship, and the Chronotope of the Colored Balcony

Part IV. Dismantling Jim Crow

8. Remaking Racial Signs: Activism and Photography in the Theater of the Sit-Ins

Afterword: Contemporary Turns

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Abel is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author and editor of several books, including Writing and Sexual Difference, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, and (with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen) Female Subjects in Black and White (UC Press).