Duke Faculty Bookwatch

Using cutting-edge research on the brain, Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011), shows how "attention blindness" has produced one of our society's greatest challenges. While we all acknowledge the great changes of the information age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century. Our institutions haven't kept pace. Weaving together elements of neuroscience, psychology, learning theory, management science, and more, Davidson introduces us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas (from schools with curriculums built around video games to companies that train workers using virtual environments) will open the doors to new ways of working and learning. Now You See It offers a refreshingly optimistic argument for a bold embrace of our connected, collaborative future.

A panel discussion on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's influential book series Empire (Harvard, 2001), Multitude (Penguin, 2005), and Commonwealth (Harvard, 2009). The panel features Profs. Michael Denning (Yale), Lawrence Grossberg (UNC Chapel Hill), Wahneema Lubiano (Duke), and Fred Moten (Duke). Prof. Hardt will also participate in the discussion. Jointly hosted by the Duke University Libraries, Faculty Bookwatch is a series that celebrates notable recent books by Duke faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Out of the House of Bondage (Cambridge University Press, 2008) views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as “friends” and “allies” of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal. Out of the House of Bondage is co-winner of the 2009 Taft Labor History Prize and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.” A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.