Signs of the times [[electronic resource] ] : the visual politics of Jim Crow / / Elizabeth Abel

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910819513803321
• Autore: Abel Elizabeth <1945->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2010
• ISBN: 1-283-27721-2; 9786613277213; 0-520-94586-7
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (415 p.)
• Disciplina: 305.800975
• Soggetti: African Americans - Segregation - Southern States - History - 20th century; Visual communication - Southern States - History - 20th century; Signs and signboards - Southern States - History - 20th century; Photography - Social aspects - Southern States - History - 20th century; Racism in popular culture - Southern States - History - 20th century; Southern States Race relations History 20th century
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction: Jim Crow's Cultural Turns -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 8. Remaking Racial Signs: Activism and Photography in the Theater of the Sit-Ins -- Afterword: Contemporary Turns -- Notes -- Select bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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 1960's 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.