Books published by Lexington Books

Through discussion of narrative prose composed from the Civil War period through the present, this book examines the positioning of the black maternal body within and in relationship to the national body politic. The author argues that the nation has simultaneously used and cast off the black mother for centuries.

This book is a comparative study of the fundamental metaphysical assumptions and their epistemological implications in Chinese and Western philosophy. The author uses a topical comparison methodology based on responses to a central topical issue to argue for commensurability in Chinese and Western metaphysics.

This book posits discrimination against vegans as a human rights violation, arguing that the rights claims of vegans should not be assessed as matters of personal and private conscience but as the re-presentation of innate duty to vulnerable others.

This book explores the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern thought in the works of Salman Rushdie, particularly his regular emphasis on the way that memory functions to construct identity for characters and nation-states.

This book focuses on the three major types of child harming within the family-abuse, incest, and filicide-examining each subject in-depth historically, legally, and comparatively.

This book examines the transitional periods of archaic Greece and late antiquity, the ostensible birth and death of the ancient west. The author argues that an interpretation of the social, political, and intellectual history of these important turning points brings to light some philosophical understanding of the dynamics of change itself.

This book discusses the relevance and value of literature in the current educational process by focusing on and locating classical values-goodness, beauty, and truth-within fictional texts.

This book analyzes the identity crisis found in nineteenth-century post-Romantic literature. By mirroring several Antihumanist theories through the Jungian theory of the shadow, the author argues that this literature anticipates our contemporary "internal conflict."

This book explores binge watching and the concept of bingeability-the likelihood that a specific show will be binge watched-from multiple perspectives. The author examines the television industry and its audiences, along with various predictors and outcomes surrounding binge watching as a behavioral phenomenon.

This book critically examines Ama Mazama, a prominent and leading female theorist in Africology and African American Studies, and her intellectual work. The author studies how and why Ama Mazama has evolved into one of the most popular Africologists in the field.

Conventional interpretations of biblical texts tend to overlook how the text and its interpretation is gendered as a white male enterprise. This book exposes centrist readings that underwrite expressions of masculinity that are singular and instead offers a playful reading that amplifies transgressive possibilities for masculine expression.

What is the relation between language, communication, and values? In Slurs and Thick Terms, Bianca Cepollaro explores the ways in which certain pieces of evaluative language, such as slurs and so-called thick terms, not only reflect speakers' moral perspectives, but also contribute to promote the speaker's evaluative stance.

This book looks at the theory behind cultural learning at the intersection of culture, visuals, and emotions and offers a theoretical and practical foundation upon which teachers can build. Lapidus explores how comics work and what makes them effective second language cultural negotiation tools.

Aghdaci argues that Iran has not yet sustained political development due to negligence by its leaders, resulting in a decline of public trust in post-revolutionary governments. He takes a statistical look at the reduction of social capital in Iran and suggests ways this trend can be reversed and political development can be maximized.

An analysis of the ways in which the intersection of class, race, and ethnicity shape the practices of diaspora-building and knowledge transfer and cause heterogeneous consequences in society, this book examines emergent highly skilled Asian migrants as racialized transnational elites through interviews with Korean international students.

The first book-length examination of Jerzy Kosinski in more than a decade, Being There in the Age of Trump goes beyond conventional literary and film analysis to a larger interdisciplinary and cultural study of the issues that Kosinski so presciently explored in both the novel and the film Being There.

Cruisicology analyzes the music culture of the cruise ship industry and considers the working life of musicians employed aboard cruise ships. It gives an overview of an industry where artists make music in close proximity to their audiences, surveys present practices, and discusses the likely future of music on passenger shipping.

Mystic Moderns examines divergent but overlapping treatments of mysticism in the fiction of early twentieth-century British authors Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb. These authors challenged assumptions of a modern, secularized age by seeing sensitivity to a greater reality as integral to their identities as modern women.

Notions of 'the teacher' live in the ideas and practices of curriculum and policies; teachers are teachers because they teach. Yet, it matters who teachers are - no attempt at good teaching and learning can manifest without having some idea of who teachers are and who they can become.

This volume examines failed attempts at modernizing the communist economy by means of optimal planning. It traces the rise and fall of the concept in Eastern Europe and China, explaining why the mission of optimization was doomed to fail and why it may nevertheless be relaunched today.

Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies brings to attention the post-theoretical discussions on the changing perceptions in literary and cultural studies. In four sections the volume presents essays that trace the engagement of post-theory with post-postmodernism, posthumanism, ethics, and politics.

You live in the cyber meta-reality. You and your family probably spend more time in this reality than any other. This book will help anyone who lives in the cyber meta-reality to understand where they live, how this world is evolving, and how we will likely evolve along with it.

Belarus, a middle-sized nation with more than a thousand years of history, is not well known beyond periodic media headlines. Modern scholarly and popular literature covers only fragments from Belarus's long history and current geopolitical, social, and cultural issues. Belarusian history in this book differs in many aspects from history and myths created by Russian scholars and propagated worldwide. The author argues for the existence of a Western-Ruthenian (Belarusian-Ukrainian) civilization as a sub-civilization of Western civilization and thus different from Eurasian civilization. With original, detailed. and critical views on Belarusian history from the ninth century to the present, it explores the latest information about Belarusian society regarding mentality, identity, religion, current elites, the Revolution of Hope 2020. It then analyzes the future prospects of Belarus based on an assessment of modern trends in human societal and political development. It provides detailed analysis of current activities of Belarusian national and ruling elites and their ideologies vis--vis the building of a nation-state.

Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book examines politics through five film genres and their variants. Gangster movies focus on American and other organized crime. They reached their zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Political thrillers express paranoia about secrecy and political conspiracies, while action movies channel anger at foreign and domestic threats to order. Superhero films and TV present modern characters who seek to serve society as they face personal struggles about their individual identities. War movies promote positive images of wars when conflicts are perceived as successful, but often include antiwar messages when wars turn out badly. Western movies fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization. The author argues that while these genres all offer escape, they also offer important political lessons.

Haunted Laughter addresses whether it is appropriate to use comedy as a literary form to depict Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Guided by existing theories of comedy and memory and through a comprehensive examination of comedic film and television productions, from the United States, Israel, and Europe, Jonathan Friedman proposes a model and a set of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of comedy as a means of representation. These criteria include depth of purpose, relevance to the times, and originality of form and content. Friedman concludes that comedies can be effective if they provide relevant information about life and death in the past, present, or future; break new ground; and serve a purpose or multiple purposescapturing the dynamic of the Nazi system of oppression, empowering or healing victims, serving as a warning for the future, or keeping those who can never grasp the real horror of genocide from losing perspective.

In Menkiti's Moral Man, Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe offers an original interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti's conception of person, one that has significant implications for his metaphysics and moral philosophy. Menkiti holds that one is not born a person but becomes a person in a linguistic and cultural community, denies that the mere possession of intrinsic properties makes one a person, and maintains that personhood is defined by the community. This last process consists in the community socially recognizing as person one who has been incorporated into society and has successfully carried out a range of obligations linked to social roles and positions. On the one hand, Oyowe clarifies the role of intrinsic properties in Menkitis account by arguing that for Menkiti, moral agency and personhood do not coincide. One is a moral agent but not a person in virtue of being rational, free, and endowed with a moral personality. On the other hand, he clarifies the sense in which the community makes one a person by drawing on principles of social ontology to explain how by adopting certain attitudes and practices a community constitutes its members as persons.This interpretation has the potential to illuminate a range of problems raised in response to Menkiti's conception of person.

In Geography and the Wealth of Nations, Sherif Khalifa argues that geography influences the factors that determine economic performance, such as the quality of institutions, the adopted cultural values, the systems of governance, the likelihood of conflict, the historical experiences, and the integration into the global economy. This book discusses in detail how geographic features influence each of these factors and how these determinants, in turn, affect economic outcomes. Khalifa shows that we cannot fully comprehend the economic consequences of these factors without exploring their geographic origins. This effort is especially critical as the world faces unprecedented environmental challenges, including climate change, worsening natural disasters, resource depletion, soil degradation, deforestation, desertification, and loss of biodiversity. Given these drastic changes, this book provides powerful insight into how geographic determinants continue to shape global crises.

The inseparable relationship between language and identity has created many problems for countries with multilingual and multicultural diversity. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed explores the issue of language policy and identity in Mauritania as a case study.

Korean Immigrants from Latin America explores the migration and resettlement experiences of Koreans from Latin America now residing in the New York metropolitan area. It uses interview data from 102 Korean secondary migrants from Latin America to explore the religious, familial, economic, and educational dimensions of their migration and resettlement processes in the U.S. As Korean and Latino immigrants share increasingly close interactions with each other in various urban settings, these Korean remigrants can serve as links between Korean and Spanish speakers as well as liaisons among diverse groups. This book shows a surprising degree of diversity within the seemingly homogenous Korean population in the U.S. and demonstrates the unacknowledged linguistic and cultural differences among them.