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

Debates over race and race-making often use the language of the "racial sign" to designate the ways bodily markers have come to be read as bearers of social meaning. Elizabeth Abel's Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow trains our attention on the history and materiality of segregation signs themselves, offering an incisive analysis of the operations of race through language and physical space in the early part of the twentieth century. Drawing on concepts of social theorists Arjun Appadurai and Michel de Certeau, Abel traces the "cultural biography" of segregation signs in a strikingly diverse range of materials. Because the signs are quickly passing into obsolescence, a key contribution of the book is the archive it assembles, with its particular emphasis on Jim Crow photography, the core of Abel's analysis. Attentive readings of the images function as "a series of site-specific microhistories" that "chart the changing intersections among a specific disposition of racial terms, the angles of vision they afford, the photographic practices they enlist, the modes of resistance they galvanize, and the critical perspectives they engage" (25). By reading the practice of segregation through the life of its physical signs, Abel offers us new critical terrain for examining the reflexive relationship between race and language: "Forcing us to read in reverse from the racial labels to the bodies they address, the signs make race visible as an effect of language rather than of biology, calling attention to the terminological inventions that are endemic to the history of race" (14).

One of the many strengths of Signs of the Times is its careful teasing out of segregation's ironies through an analysis of its signs as physical objects. Situated at the intersection of public and private, Chapter One argues that segregation signs are early examples of American graffiti, noting that "a surprisingly broad cross-section of the American public … left its racial signature in this perversely democratic mode of expression" that "encompass[ed] public officials and private individuals, professional sign-makers and amateur scribblers" (36). Reading the graphic materiality of the signs against the abstract discursive voice of authority they channeled, Abel presents us with examples of the ways handwritten inscriptions or crude signs riddled with misspellings reveal individual idiosyncrasies of the authors as much as they demarcate racial space. Nevertheless, she notes that "even the most minimal form—a single racial word—functioned as a citation of the larger social framework that backed that word's authority" (38). The chapter ends with an analysis of how the authority cited by the signs shifted in the hands of African American activists who collected the signs as evidence of injustice as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction.

Chapter Two shifts from "physical to photographic modes of reproduction, and from historical to theoretical accounts of photography's role in the construction of racial meaning" (26). Abel balances an analysis of the verbal register of the signs against the visual register of photographs, taken largely by African American photographers. Paul Gilroy, Walter Benjamin, and Charles Sanders Pierce inform her reading of semiotics and photography, which understands the photographic image in terms of indexical and symbolic signs. She argues that the "linguistic features of photography … complicate the association of whiteness with creative word, and of color with compliant image" (63). Examples throughout the chapter demonstrate how the photographic image rewrites the verbal signs which are its subject. Chapter Three examines questions of the archive, noting that the signs were "too offensive to enlist the aesthetic interest of Northern photographers such as Walker Evans … and too routine to capture the attention of Southern documentarians" (26). These first three chapters constitute Part One, which focuses on the life of the signs as both medium and cultural memory.

Part Two, "Race and Space," prompts a reconsideration of what Abel calls the "imaginative bedrock of Jim Crow," the "illusion of a stable binary" guiding segregation and...