[Commlist] New book: Horrible White People

New publication from NYU Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Horrible White People*

Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness

*Taylor Nygaard & Jorie Lagerwey***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479805358/horrible-white-people/_*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLF2020*

Examines the bleak television comedies that illustrate the obsession of 
the white left with its own anxiety and suffering.

At the same time that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump 
were elected and reactionary socio-economic policies like Brexit were 
voted into law, representations of bleakly comic white fragility spread 
across television screens. American and British programming that 
featured the abjection of young, middle-class, liberal white people—such 
as /Broad City/, /Casual/, /You’re the Worst/, /Catastrophe/, /Fleabag/, 
and /Transparent/—proliferated to wide popular acclaim in the 2010s. 
Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey track how these shows of the white 
left, obsessed with its own anxiety and suffering, are complicit in the 
rise and maintenance of the far right—particularly in the mobilization, 
representation, and sustenance of structural white supremacy on television.

Nygaard and Lagerwey examine a cycle of dark television comedies, the 
focus of which are “horrible white people,” by putting them in 
conversation with similar upmarket comedies from creators and casts of 
color like /Insecure/, /Atlanta/, /Dear White People/, and /Master of 
None/. Through their analysis, they demonstrate the ways these 
non-white-centric shows negotiate prestige TV’s dominant aesthetics of 
whiteness and push back against the centering of white suffering in a 
time of cultural crisis.

Through the lens of media analysis and feminist cultural studies, 
Nygaard and Lagerwey’s book opens up new ways of looking at contemporary 
television consumption—and the political, cultural, and social 
repercussions of these “horrible white people” shows, both on- and 
off-screen.

*Taylor Nygaard* is a Faculty Associate in the Department of English’s 
Film and Media Studies division at Arizona State University. She writes 
about identity, television, digital culture and media industries. Her 
work has appeared in /Feminist Media Studies, TV and New Media, /FLOW, 
and elsewhere.

*Jorie Lagerwey* is Associate Professor in Television Studies in 
University College Dublin. She writes about race, gender, genre, 
celebrity and television. She is the author of /Postfeminist Celebrity 
and Motherhood: Brand Mom /(2016). Her work has appeared in /Cinema 
Journal/, /TV and New Media/, /Celebrity Studies/, FLOW, and elsewhere.


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