The Historical Uncanny: Segregation Signs in Getting Mother's Body , a Post-Civil Rights American Novel

Abstract

The segregation sign is an object of desire and scorn in post-civil rights America. We seek them out in museums and public exhibits, asking them to reassure us that Jim Crow is indeed dead, but we wonder if such venues can bear burden of representing lived experience of compulsory race segregation. (1) We also excavate cultural detritus from that era and give it an afterlife, such as in hot collector markets in authentic Jim Crow memorabilia from mammy cookie jars to blackface production programs. (2) David Pilgrim, curator of Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, attempts to get beyond a thick naivete about America's by opting for a therapeutic model based in the belief that open, honest, even painful discussions about race are necessary to avoid yesterday's mistakes (n. pag.). Pilgrim asks post-civil rights subjects to gaze upon his objects with wonder and contempt, fascinated but also committed to keeping them in their place in historical narrative. such an exchange, we deputize ourselves watchful guardians of a newer, more enlightened era, lest Jim Crow, Jr., and his goons come knocking at back door. But do segregation signs cooperate? The segregation sign is a particularly overdetermined pillar of what John L. Jackson, Jr., calls racial Americana, from which salience of race returns whether we like it or not in a reputedly postracial era, especially one now governed by a biracial U. S. president. For post-civil rights subjects, Jim Crow segregation signs embody a familiar yet seemingly removed history. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford consider debates over how best to remember civil rights movement, from state- sanctioned monuments to later movements taking up mantle, since the contests over meanings of movement must be understood as part of continuing fight against racism and inequality (xxi). Regarding Whoopi Goldberg's Wall of Shame of mammies, coons, and whites-only signs, Elizabeth Abel writes, In a calculated shift of context, she and other African American collectors reappropriate segregation signs and other artifacts of discrimination as a burden of proof against their producers. Repossessed, signs now speak as symptoms; instead of imprinting bodies they address, they fingerprint bodies they express (16). Literature has a key role here as well. Literary scholars are identifying a tradition of segregation narrative, while Michele Elam has noticed a curious resurgence of passing narrative in contemporary literature, and I have tracked historiographic preoccupations with Jim Crow in post-civil rights American literature. (3) Extending that work, I suggest that psychoanalytic concept of uncanny is useful in describing effect of encountering fictional segregation signs today. The concept gets at strange process of inscription embedded in such signs, process of making them legible. Segregation signs both reflected and generated racialized subjects in a process that cleaved I and not-I via crowbar of Jim Crow citizenship, which is to say U. S. citizenship. (4) There is another layer for contemporary fiction readers: identifying with and against those past subjects reading sign in historical moment, some of whom may now be contemporary readers. Literary scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Elizabeth Abel, Susan Gubar, and Claudia Tate developed compelling models for how to bring psychoanalytic interests in identity and psychic development to critical race studies' historical concerns about race and injustice, which also moves such interests into public and collective dimensions of memory. I am indebted to them as I consider what such a frame can say about one particularly illustrative--delightful, I might say--instance of Jim Crow signage in post-civil rights fiction: Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body (2003). The novel is set on eve of 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, but with post-civil rights reader in mind. …