Another excellent forthcoming Duke University Press title we’ve recently indexed at Southwest Humanities, Kelli Moore’s Legal Spectatorship: Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence is a careful and original examination of the political origins of domestic violence in the United States through the lens of visual culture. In this important contribution to the fields of media studies, African American studies, gender studies, and more, Legal Spectatorship “contends that domestic violence refers to more than violence between intimate partners—it denotes the mechanisms of racial hierarchy and oppression that undergird republican government in the United States.” Through analysis of source material ranging from “Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, abolitionist print culture, courtroom witness testimony, and the work of Hortense Spillers, Moore shows how the logic of slavery and antiblack racism also dictates the silencing techniques of the contemporary domestic violence courtroom.” Legal Spectatorship is scheduled to be published in May 2022. You can find more information about this book at the Duke University Press website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 