Livres électroniques de Sciences sociales

The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television.   The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable.   In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.

When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people. High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict, usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear. In this “compulsively readable” (Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author) book, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free. Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to realize, years later, that the story he’d told himself about the conflict was not quite true. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better, even as they continue to disagree. All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into good conflict, the kind that made them better people. They rehumanized and recatego­rized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is an “insightful and enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) book—and a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.

Essays include: A romantic relationship unravels while Gutiérrez contemplates the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object.  El Tiradito, a popular shrine in downtown Tucson, becomes a backdrop for the retelling of a classed, clandestine love affair between young laborer Juan Olivera and his hacendado’s wife, scaffolding questions of labor, belief, desire, and self-making.  A travel diary from Tijuana to San Diego, from the border wall prototypes in one country to a wedding in another, highlights questions of gender, ethnic identity, and citizenship status.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Prisoners of Geography, a fascinating, “refreshing, and very useful” (The Washington Post) follow-up that uses ten maps to explain the challenges to today’s world powers and how they presage a volatile future. Tim Marshall’s global bestseller Prisoners of Geography offered us a “fresh way of looking at maps” (The New York Times Book Review), showing how every nation’s choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and walls. Since then, the geography hasn’t changed, but the world has. Now, in this “wonderfully entertaining and lucid account, written with wit, pace, and clarity” (Mirror, UK), Marshall takes us into ten regions set to shape global politics. Find out why US interest in the Middle East will wane; why Australia is now beginning an epic contest with China; how Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UK are cleverly positioning themselves for greater power; why Ethiopia can control Egypt; and why Europe’s next refugee crisis looms closer than we think, as does a cutting-edge arms race to control space. Innovative, compelling, and delivered with Marshall’s trademark wit and insight, this is “an immersive blend of history, economics, and political analysis that puts geography at the center of human affairs” (Publishers Weekly).

With deeply personal and uplifting essays in the vein of Black Girls Rock, You Are Your Best Thing, and I Really Needed This Today, this is “a necessary testimony on the magic and beauty of our capacity to live and love fully and out loud” (Kerry Washington). When Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts wrote an essay on Black joy for The Washington Post, she had no idea just how deeply it would resonate. But the outpouring of positive responses affirmed her own lived experience: that Black joy is not just a weapon of resistance, it is a tool for resilience. With this book, Tracey aims to gift her community with a collection of lyrical essays about the way joy has evolved, even in the midst of trauma, in her own life. Detailing these instances of joy in the context of Black culture allows us to recognize the power of Black joy as a resource to draw upon, and to challenge the one-note narratives of Black life as solely comprised of trauma and hardship. “Lewis-Giggetts etches a stunning personal map that follows in her ancestors’ footsteps and highlights their ability to take control of situational heartbreak and tragedy and make something better out of it….A simultaneously gorgeous and heartbreaking read” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other, and the first Black woman and first Black British person to receive this honor. There is huge international enthusiasm surrounding Manifesto, her first book since the Booker win, a bold work of memoir, criticism, and activism. Grove’s edition of Girl, Woman, Other was a national bestseller and has sold 250,000 copies across all formats. It has been one of the most talked-about novels of recent years, and named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019, as well as Roxane Gay’s favorite book of the year. It landed on a bevy of “best of” lists, including that of the New Yorker, the Washington Post, NPR, and many others. Manifesto offers Evaristo’s unique story of monumental success after decades of struggle for recognition. It is a hopeful and inspirational story of perseverance that will resonate with all generations of creative people, and especially those who have seen their stories go disregarded as marginal in mainstream channels. Building on a long tradition of radical Black women writers, from Audre Lorde to Nikki Giovanni to Roxane Gay, in Manifesto Evaristo combines equal parts personal memoir, bold and incisive criticism, and hands-on manual, creating a vital and accessible tool for anyone encountering stumbling blocks in their own work. In the past years, Evaristo’s star has risen astronomically in the UK and in the United States. She was named Author of the Year by the British Book Awards in 2020 and elected as an International Honorary Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and has become an important advocate for changes in the publishing industry. We have major expectations for Manifesto, coming off the many successes of Girl, Woman, Other. We expect major review attention and profiles, as well as television and radio interest. We are also in early discussions surrounding a stateside tour in early 2022. Evaristo is constantly in-demand for op-eds and other short-form writing at major outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, and she is frequently asked to comment for television programs including Trevor Noah’s Daily Show and CNN. We will send early copies to many of her countless vocal fans, including Marlon James, Rumaan Alam, Tom Stoppard, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Natalie Portman. We will also try our best to get copies to President Obama and Michelle Obama, as well as to Oprah. Girl, Woman, Other was hugely championed by booksellers at indie bookstores, and remained on the ABA regional bestseller lists for much of 2020. We will do aggressive outreach for an Indie Next Pick for Manifesto. We also had tremendous success with a special edition at Target, where Girl, Woman, Other was chosen for the Target Diverse Book Club. It sold over 10,000 copies, with 5,000 copies specially signed by Evaristo. A television adaptation of Girl, Woman, Other is in the works, with rights acquired by Potboiler Television, whose previous literary adaptations include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, starring Lupita Nyong’o.

A powerfully moving book that “could make graspable why today’s prisons are contemporary slave plantations” (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple), giving voice to the poorest among us and laying bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. The class’s artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heartbreaking detail in Our Class. This “magnificent” (Cornel West, author of Race Matters) book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.