Signs of the Time: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (review)

Elizabeth Abel delivers an impressive study of the visual politics of compulsory race segregation in the United States, especially its most iconic artifact: the segregation sign. Signs of the Times is erudite, meticulous, and ambitious as it trains us to read the spaces of Jim Crow. Abel succeeds in moving Jim Crow signs from mere historical backdrop to cultural texts that actively governed space in the American South. Segregation signs are “arguably America’s most public and pervasive racial text” (xx), and Abel tracks their role in the evolution of the color line through a “linguistic turn, a spatial turn, and a visual turn, each of which reprises and reverses the others” (6).

Segregation signs, Abel finds, required complex reading and negotiation strategies on the part of subjects of Jim Crow, and they now require equally complex interpretive strategies. Abel renders such signs legible by drawing on theorists of the semiotic, the visual, and the everyday. She accounts for the way segregation signs attempted to regulate space and mobility, but also how Jim Crow’s subjects were able to resist, and sometimes manipulate, such signs. This leads to one of the biggest surprises in this wonderful book: that segregation signs mark an important cultural moment in antiracist progress when race moves from the biological to the semiotic, cultural, and public spheres where activism and social change are possible. “Although it may be as reckless as it is perverse to suggest that Jim Crow signs might also be viewed as an embryonic form of the turn away from the biological racism of which they were also the expression,” Abel argues, “the point is not to minimize their brutality but to maximize their legibility as interventions in a process of resignification” (11).

Abel organizes chapters chronologically to trace the social life of segregation signs from their late nineteenth-century inception, through civil rights-era dismantling, to their afterlives as collector items and political tools that help finish the job of dismantling Jim Crow’s legacy. Along the way, she covers considerable ground, especially in terms of geography, location, and archive. Thus Abel augments more traditional histories of segregation and desegregation, or, in her words, she moves from “the courthouse or the statehouse to the outhouse and other lowly and local structures onto which Jim Crow signs were attached” (xix). She looks not only at official or official-looking signs, but also informal and even more egregious homemade signs, and the spaces each sought to govern. Abel is concerned with any such space, but especially the most hotly contested: restrooms, drinking fountains, eating establishments, and movie theaters. She considers documentary photographs that focus our vision on Jim Crow signs, often in ways that break down binary designations for outside viewers. Finally, she considers what it means that these objects circulate as volatile political signs in a post-Jim Crow era and as commodities in memorabilia markets. In all this, Abel is well aware of the spectrum of what people can do with segregation signs: “producing, reproducing, collecting, performing, and transgressing” (7).

Abel’s close reading of individual examples—some well known, others less so—is unwaveringly graceful and profound as she traces a network of signs, uncovering the semiotic system from which iconic images have been extracted to become mere signposts in the cultural imagination. What is more, Abel’s research process itself is noteworthy because original segregation signs are strangely scarce and dispersed. In the move to dismantle de jure segregation, signs were removed and discarded. “We owe the preservation of the few surviving original signs,” Abel writes, “almost entirely to the courage and foresight of the generation of African Americans who came of age during the civil rights movement and collected the signs as a form of activism. . . . By retrieving these tools of subjugation, these activist collectors—Certeau-style consumers—turned segregation signs around to testify against their makers” (48). For her part, Abel assembles an “archive of the ordinary,” one that...