Ali Rattansi
Biographic Data
| ID | 3742018 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ali Rattansi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ali |
| FAMILY NAME | Rattansi |
| SIGNATURE | RATTANSI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | City, University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A postcolonial/decolonising critique of Zygmunt Bauman
Racism
Racism: A Very Short Introduction explores the history of racial ideas and a wide range of racisms—biological, cultural, colourblind, and structural—and illuminates issues that have been the subject of recent debates. Is Islamophobia a form of racism? Is there a new antisemitism? Why has whiteness become an important source of debate? What is intersectionality? What is unconscious or implicit bias, and what is its importance in understanding raci…
Scp>Bauman,Zygmunt (1925–2017)
Zygmunt Bauman has been hailed as one of the world's leading sociologists. He was a prolific writer who reputedly wrote at least 70 books and by his own account his work has been translated into 35 languages. This entry gives an overview of his main ideas, focusing especially on his intellectual affinities with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, his most famous book, which was on the Holocaust, his postmodernist phase, his concept of “liqui…
The ambivalences of modernity
Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and Ambivalence a mere two years after Modernity and the Holocaust. The book Modernity and Ambivalence reveals all too clearly Bauman's own deeply ambivalent perception of modernity. Bauman identifies modernity with the modern nation-state, and states that its origins lie in the period beginning with the seventeenth century, followed by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In Modernity and Ambivalenc…
‘Solid’ modernity
Zygmunt Bauman was well aware of a major pitfall in using analogies for characterising what he saw as a crucial faultline between 'solid' and 'liquid' in the history of modernity. Marx and Engels in a now famous passage in The Communist Manifesto referred to their period of capitalism as one in which change was so rapid that 'all that is solid melts into air'. Bauman's answer is that in Marx's time, and throughout the phase of 'solid modernity', …
Sociology and postmodernity
Zygmunt Bauman argues that the very notion of 'society', theorised within orthodox sociology as identical to a nation-state, needs to be rethought. For in a postmodern world of globalisation the sovereignty of the nation-state is being undermined, and a strict differentiation between what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' a society is increasingly implausible. Bauman calls the 'postmodern habitat' a complex system which is radically unpredictable…
Modernism and postmodernism
Modernism' is a term usually reserved for a set of movements in the arts that gained a particular momentum in the early years of the twentieth century and continued to flourish until at least the middle of the twentieth century, the periodisation being dependent on when one believes that a new set of aesthetic strategies and products, dubbed postmodernist, began. This chapter discusses that for many commentators postmodernism in the arts was, by …
Aspects of Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity
In his (relatively conventional) sociology of postmodernity Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes his own position by identifying where the even more conventional 'orthodox consensus' in sociology had gone wrong, thus ending up in crisis. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor is a particularly useful text with which to begin, for in it Bauman provides a succinct overview, sketching out the key elements in his analysis of postmodernity. In Life in Fragments B…
Part III
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
Bauman on the Enlightenment and modernity
Zygmunt Bauman analyzed the Enlightenment and indeed the whole of Western modernity and postmodernity from a perspective that focused on the changing status of intellectuals in relation to the state. Indeed, the very emergence of intellectuals as a separate and special social category is said by Bauman to be inextricably tied to the Enlightenment. Modernity and intellectuals were part and parcel of two major new phenomena that began to flourish d…
Dedication
Liquid modernity
Zygmunt Bauman says that liquid modernity, not unlike postmodernity, is a time of 'interregnum'. It is the one in which existing institutions, because of 'deregulation, fragmentation and privatization', have been denuded of larger visions and the capacity to bring about change, resulting in a profound loss of trust in dominant institutions. The two key features of the liquid phase of modernity for Bauman are globalisation and individualisation. B…
‘Liquid’ writing and liquid modernity
Bauman repeated his nostrums on liquid modernity with only slight variation and often with verbatim repetition across a vast number of mostly lightweight books. These included some very lightweight books such as Liquid Times and Culture in a Liquid Modern World. This chapter emphasises that there are few significant differences between Bauman's characterisations of solid and liquid modernity and his earlier distinction between modernity and postm…
Why did Bauman become a postmodernist?
The Enlightenment, or a particular, selective interpretation of it, was a key target of the postmodernists who attacked its supposed hyper-rationalism and militant universalism. Zygmunt Bauman had already absorbed the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory version of the critique of Enlightenment as set out, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. For Bauman, the citizens of the Soviet Union an…
Postmodern ethics
Bauman described his delighted discovery of Levinas's work as a 'Eureka' moment. Levinas's work was postmodern in the same sense that pervaded Bauman's sense of the postmodern. Levinas's ethical thinking attempted to go beyond the rationalism of Enlightenment and especially Kantian moral discourse. For Levinas, as for Bauman, modern, Enlightenment-derived morality was a matter of duty, of finding the right rules which could then be universally bi…
Aspects of liquid modernity
This chapter presents a series of critical reflections on Zygmunt Bauman's diagnosis and critique of postmodernity, with regard to some of the ideas he now groups under the umbrella of a critique of liquid modernity. Bauman was one of the earliest of post-Second World War sociologists to put the critique of consumerism at the heart of his diagnosis of the problems of life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For this he deserve…
Part II
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
The Holocaust’s modernity
Hannah Arendt was one of the first intellectuals to confront, in 1945, the enormity of what had happened to six million Jews and millions of Roma, Poles and others in the Holocaust. Zygmunt Bauman's own thesis of the Holocaust's modernity, he argues, is impossible to formulate within conventional sociological frameworks. Without anti-Semitism the Holocaust, aimed first and foremost at Jews, would obviously not have been possible. Bauman's reflect…
Conclusion
This chapter focuses primarily on one final issue, was Zygmunt Bauman an optimist or a pessimist. Bauman's views constantly vacillated between optimism and pessimism. Despite the pessimism of so much of his work, Bauman remained hopeful. While the totalitarianism that Bauman had experienced and suffered from, Nazism and Soviet-style Communism, do not now exist, Bauman was always on the look-out for new dangers to personal and collective freedoms.…
‘Metaphoricity’ in Bauman’s sociology
Bauman's deployment of metaphors is a defining feature of his sociology, and most commentators have argued that Bauman's sociology has a 'literary edge' giving it a number of strengths, and should not be judged in a conventional sociological manner. This chapter discusses the role of metaphors in sociology. Bauman points out in an interview with Jacobsen that sociology cannot do without metaphors, even the idea of 'society' started life as a meta…
Part I
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employmen…
‘Liquid’ modernity vs ‘reflexive’ modernity
Zygmunt Bauman's conception of agency has been a source of some debate, and has often been tied in to a concern over whether he is fundamentally a pessimist or an optimist. Dawson has argued, however, that once Bauman's Levinasian understanding of morality is taken into account, together with his conception of culture and the inevitability of moral choice, not only is he an optimist but he has an adequate notion of the powers of individual agency…
On the ‘liquid’ metaphor
Coining the concept of 'liquid modernity' was a way of putting the matter beyond any doubt, while also giving a positive content to the new reality. Mark Davis is insistent that Bauman's decision to use the metaphor of liquidity 'can be seen as an artistic, literary decision rather than a scientific one'. Bauman's choice of and explication of the 'liquid' metaphor cannot be considered immune to critical interrogation simply because it may in part…
The whys and wherefores of the demise of postmodernism
Mathewman and Hoey suggest that the notorious 'Sokal affair' may have played its part in discrediting postmodernism. The fact that many who had been attacked for their postmodernism had never embraced the term of course did little to help the postmodernist cause. Poststructuralism, one of postmodernism's components, especially the influence of Foucault, has certainly survived in a variety of academic guises. And the 'cultural' and 'linguistic' tu…
Index
Postcolonialism and its discontents
This paper privides a critical assessment of the field of postcolonialism or postcolonialist studies, which has gron rapidly since the publication of Said's Orientalism. It is argued that the area of investigations's distinctive features, and originality, lie in the concern with the mutual constitution of the identities of colonizer and colonized, and in its analyses of chronic instabilities inhabiting and destabilizing the colonial project from …
Bauman and contemporary sociology
This book is a critical engagement with Zygmunt Bauman's ideas and arguments as found in selected texts and interviews of his postmodern and liquid modern phases. In Part I of the book, the focus is on Bauman's analysis of modernity, and his interpretation of the relationship between modernity and the Enlightenment as presented in Legislators and Interpreters. For Bauman, the deepest reason for sociology's failure to deal adequately with the Holo…
On Being And Not Being Brown/Black-British
This essay focuses on the forces that have been transforming ethnic identities in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores how and why hybrid identities, such as black British and British Asian, have been and continue to be subject to chronic destabilizing currents. In the light of the 1998 Windrush celebrations, recent ethnographic material is used to discuss the ways in which there is defensive as well as …
End of an Orthodoxy? The Critique of Sociology's View of Marx on Class
In this paper I comment critically on the dominant form of appropriation of Marx's theory of class and the state within what one might call the 'conventional' sociology of class in the post-war period. I argue that the typical mode of interpretation and assimilation has been highly selective and has taken a form that has rendered the proposed theory particularly vulnerable to sociological criticism especially in the light of changes in the struct…
Social mobility without class
Dialogues on Difference
Forget Postmodernism? Notes from De Bunker
A postcolonial/decolonising critique of Zygmunt Bauman
Marxian Socialism
Social mobility without class
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of …
Marx and the Division of Labour
Class, social mobility and politics
End of an Orthodoxy? The Critique of Sociology's View of Marx on Class
In this paper I comment critically on the dominant form of appropriation of Marx's theory of class and the state within what one might call the 'conventional' sociology of class in the post-war period. I argue that the typical mode of interpretation and assimilation has been highly selective and has taken a form that has rendered the proposed theory particularly vulnerable to sociological criticism especially in the light of changes in the struct…
Social Classes in Marxist Theory
First published in 1984. This study critically examines the conceptions of social class employed by Marx and by modern Marxist writers, to probe their problematic areas and to propose certain modifications to those conception. The author also tests the conclusions deriving from this theoretical reflection against the task of analysing some aspects of the development of class relations in a particular social formation in Britain. This title will b…
Marxian Socialism
Postmodernism and Society
Neither a manifesto nor a one-sided critique, this new book introduces a number of original essays exploring various aspects of that contemporary cultural phenomenon named postmodernism. These essays are prefaced by an introductory essay which sets out the major lines of a debate which is about nothing less than the current shape and future prospects of our society
The Colour of Love
What Future for Education
Forget Postmodernism? Notes from De Bunker
Postcolonialism and its discontents
This paper privides a critical assessment of the field of postcolonialism or postcolonialist studies, which has gron rapidly since the publication of Said's Orientalism. It is argued that the area of investigations's distinctive features, and originality, lie in the concern with the mutual constitution of the identities of colonizer and colonized, and in its analyses of chronic instabilities inhabiting and destabilizing the colonial project from …
On Being And Not Being Brown/Black-British
This essay focuses on the forces that have been transforming ethnic identities in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, it explores how and why hybrid identities, such as black British and British Asian, have been and continue to be subject to chronic destabilizing currents. In the light of the 1998 Windrush celebrations, recent ethnographic material is used to discuss the ways in which there is defensive as well as …
Dialogues on Difference
Proliferating Theories
Focuses on the documentary issues significantly considered to the current study of teenagers and their identities. Interpersonal identity formation during early adolescence; Criticisms on feminist perspectives in its relevance for contemporary identity development research; Examination of the ego identity status paradigm
Rethinking Youth Identities
Reprinted from Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in a European Context, edited by John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm, and Andy Furlong. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997. © Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in a European Context, edited by John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm, and Andy Furlong, 1997, Ashgate
Racism
Racism: A Very Short Introduction incorporates the latest research to demystify the subject and to explore its history, science, and culture. But what actually is race? How has racism come to be so firmly established? Why do so few people actually admit to being racist? How are race, ethnicity, and xenophobia related? How has racism evolved since its earliest beginnings? It seems paradoxical that it still exists despite scientific discrediting of…
Racism
From subtle discrimination in everyday life, to horrors like lynching in the Old South, cultural imperialism, and "ethnic cleansing", racism exists in many different forms, in almost every facet of society. Despite civil rights movements and other attempts at progress, racial prejudices and stereotypes remain deeply embedded in Western culture. This book takes a frank and objective look at why these notions exist. It explores how racism has come …
Multiculturalism
Introduction 1. What is multiculturalism? 2. Is multiculturalism bad for women? 3. Is multiculturalism responsible for social disintegration, ghettos and 'parallel lives'? 4. Ethnic minority integration, class inequality and 'community cohesion' 5. National identity, belonging and 'the Muslim question' 6. Moving on: multiculturalism, interculturalism and transnationalism in a new global era References Further Reading
Race's Recurrence
The race idea keeps recurring in different guises and yet has an intriguing 'ever-changing sameness'. Ash Amin has provided an insightful discussion of the question in an earlier issue of this journal. I supplement his account by pointing to the ways in which the nature-culture puzzle identified by Lévi-Strauss creates continuing spaces and seductions for the race idea. I offer an account of the perils of using supposedly 'natural' human attribut…
Zygmunt Bauman
The ambivalences of modernity
Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and Ambivalence a mere two years after Modernity and the Holocaust. The book Modernity and Ambivalence reveals all too clearly Bauman's own deeply ambivalent perception of modernity. Bauman identifies modernity with the modern nation-state, and states that its origins lie in the period beginning with the seventeenth century, followed by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. In Modernity and Ambivalenc…
‘Solid’ modernity
Zygmunt Bauman was well aware of a major pitfall in using analogies for characterising what he saw as a crucial faultline between 'solid' and 'liquid' in the history of modernity. Marx and Engels in a now famous passage in The Communist Manifesto referred to their period of capitalism as one in which change was so rapid that 'all that is solid melts into air'. Bauman's answer is that in Marx's time, and throughout the phase of 'solid modernity', …
Sociology and postmodernity
Zygmunt Bauman argues that the very notion of 'society', theorised within orthodox sociology as identical to a nation-state, needs to be rethought. For in a postmodern world of globalisation the sovereignty of the nation-state is being undermined, and a strict differentiation between what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' a society is increasingly implausible. Bauman calls the 'postmodern habitat' a complex system which is radically unpredictable…
Modernism and postmodernism
Modernism' is a term usually reserved for a set of movements in the arts that gained a particular momentum in the early years of the twentieth century and continued to flourish until at least the middle of the twentieth century, the periodisation being dependent on when one believes that a new set of aesthetic strategies and products, dubbed postmodernist, began. This chapter discusses that for many commentators postmodernism in the arts was, by …
Sociology (41 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Aesthetics (21 works) · Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology (19 works) · Modernity (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Postmodernism (14 works)