2023 ASA Book Awards
2023 Lora Romero First Book Prize
2023 Romero Prize Honorable Mention
A01=Kelli Moore
American Studies Association Book Awards
Author_Kelli Moore
Category=JBCT
Category=JBFK3
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSL
Category=NHTB
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Product details
- ISBN 9781478018346
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 152mm
- Publication Date: 27 May 2022
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Legal Spectatorship Kelli Moore traces the political origins of the concept of domestic violence through visual culture in the United States. Tracing its appearance in Article IV of the Constitution, slave narratives, police notation, cybernetic theories of affect, criminal trials, and the “look” of the battered woman, Moore 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. Moore connects the use of photographic evidence of domestic violence in courtrooms, which often stands in for women’s testimony, to slaves’ silent experience and witnessing of domestic abuse. Drawing on 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. By positioning testimony on contemporary domestic violence prosecution within the archive of slavery, Moore demonstrates that domestic violence and its image are haunted by black bodies, black flesh, and black freedom.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Kelli Moore is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
