What to See This Week: Romance Novels & Football as Lifestyle and a Health Issue
You may think you know how romance novels work. The alpha male disrespects the prideful heroine, she learns a lesson and the two learn to submit to their mutual attraction. Duke professors Katharine Brophy Dubois and Julie Tetel, both romance novel authors, have other ideas. They will talk about the role of a fiction genre regularly criticized for celebrating alpha masculinity, the objectification of women and whiteness in a panel discussion on “Feminism and the Romance Novel.” Noon, East Duke Parlors, East Duke Building
The Doomsday clock recently moved a little closer to midnight in January, a common event during the nuclear war scares of the Cold War. It’s a sign that the threat of nuclear war is back in popular consciousness. At the Power Plant Gallery, artist Erin Johnson's exhibit “The Way Things Can Happen” revisits the 1983 made-for-TV movie “The Day After” about the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war. Johnson will join other artists, scholars and activists for a public discussion of reactions in the 1980s to nuclear proliferation, contemporary concerns about nuclear war and the role artists and activists should play. Noon, Power Plant Gallery, American Tobacco Campus.
Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe converted to Christianity at age 17 and almost immediately started turning his faith into art. Using the traditional Japanese folk art of stencil dying, or katazome, Watanabe became known as Japan’s leading artist to portray biblical scenes translated into Japanese settings. Fifty of his stencil prints of biblical scenes are now showing in Duke Chapel in partnership with the Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. The exhibit runs through Feb. 21. Duke Divinity student Lisa Beyeler will discuss the prints and Watanabe’s art during a reception. 7 p.m., Duke Chapel narthex.
It is a moment, says Duke dance professor Thomas DeFrantz “when we are all thinking about how to move with intention, effectiveness, and also a communal, shared joy.” The Third Collegium for African Diaspora Dance will expand on that idea by spending three days of scholarship and performance exploring African diasporic dance as a resource of both joy and defiance. The conference will feature a remembrance of Baba Chuck Davis, founder of the African American Dance Ensemble, and a performance of “Cane: a responsive environment dancework” conceived by DeFrantz. Schedule and locations can be found here.
The Super Bowl is over, but there’s a need to talk more about football, both as a beautiful game that is deeply ingrained in American culture and about the horrific violence inherent in the sport that leaves lasting effects on the families of the people most involved in it. A two-day conference at Duke explores the game as a cultural and a health issue. It starts with a showing Friday night of the film “Requiem for a Running Back” exploring head trauma and continues with a full-day conference Saturday at the School of Law involving legal, medical and cultural scholars. Among the participants will be NFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson and Duke economics professor Lori Leachman, author of the new book “The King of Halloween & Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter’s Tale of Family and Football.” Friday: 6:30 p.m., Nasher Museum of Art. Saturday conference: 1-6 p.m. 3037 School of Law.