New Books In African American Studies

I think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs of segregated water fountains in the American South, you will almost never find one that features a black woman, a white woman or a white man drinking. They are nearly all of black men drinking. Why is that? In her fine and thoughtful book Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), Elizabeth Abel tells us why. Segregation, like many social phenomena, had a triple life. 1) It was a thing, part of an objective reality now past (one wants to cite Ranke here). 2) It was a thing seen, an object filtered through the subjective experience of viewers (one wants to cite Kant here). 3) And it was a thing shown, a sign made by one person to be communicated to others (one wants to cite Saussure here). We can see these three lives in the sources Abel examines: photographs of segregation signs: “Whites Only”, “No Negroes”, “Colored Entrance”, and so on. They simultaneously