Enacted by state and local legislators between 1876 and 1965, the Jim Crow laws mandated de jure racial segregation under the guise of "separate but equal." Though we live in a different era--one some hopefully or naively label "post-racial"--Jim Crow's legacy continues. This infiltration of the present by Jim Crow's past might not be apparent, however, when one looks to the visuals that emerged from the era. These images, oftentimes blunt in their evocation of separate accommodations, sometimes appear as dated remnants of a distinctly bygone era of American history.

This month's Berkeley Books selection, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow by Professor of English, Elizabeth Abel, illuminates what C. Vann Woodward has called the "strange career of Jim Crow" via close analysis of numerous visual representations taken from the era. These images and their signs, Abel writes, both highlight and enact "three interrelated displacements: from somatic to graphic sign, from genealogy to geography, and from word to image." By deftly tracing the contours of a linguistically instantiated racial barrier's transition to law, geographic partitioning, and visual icon, Abel traces how each shift troubles the tenuous stability of that which comes before it. Looking to how segregation functions in restroom doors, drinking fountains, and motion picture halls, Abel traces the existences of Jim Crow and, via astute analysis, reveals how these operations are anything but extinct.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, writes: "Abel writes most incisively about what Jim Crow looked and looks like today. She makes an utterly convincing case that pictures were every bit as powerful as words, if not more so, in the many images of Jim Crow."

Signs has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book published in American Studies in 2010. Abel's previous books include Writing and Sexual Difference (1982), Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1993), and (with Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen) Female Subjects in Black and White (1997). For her commitment to teaching and mentoring, Berkeley has given her both a Distinguished Teaching Award and a Distinguished Undergraduate Mentor award . Her work spans two broad fields of inquiry: gender theory, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction in addition to race, cultural studies, and visuality.

Visit the Biblio-file to view books that shaped Professor Abel's thinking while working on Signs of the Times.