A postcolonial/decolonising critique of Zygmunt Bauman: A response to Dawson

In his article ‘The War Against Forgetfulness: Sociological Lessons from Bauman’s Writings on European Jewry’ (2020: 1–16), Matt Dawson attempts to ‘push back on an emerging claim that Bauman can unproblematically be categorised as a “white European theorist”’ and aims many of his critical shafts at my book Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis (2017). However, Dawson omits to elaborate upon an important argument that I develop at some length in my book, which is that Bauman has the perspective of a white male sociologist, and that his maleness is entangled in his whiteness and his Eurocentrism, all of which inflect his work in a variety of ways.

It is by now well acknowledged that both classical sociology and Western Marxism emerged in an attempt to understand Western ‘modernity’. Nevertheless, what remains too often unacknowledged is that sociology and Western Marxism’s world view has been an outward gaze from inside the West, seeing non-Western cultures as tradition-bound and ‘backward’. This is particularly clear in the disciplinary division between sociology and anthropology. The study of ‘traditional’ societies has been relegated to anthropology, a discipline with strong connections to imperial and colonial projects (Asad, 1973).

It is my argument, in common with other postcolonialist/decolonising intellectuals and academics (see, for important examples in sociology, Connell, 2007, 2018; Bhambra, 2007, 2014; Rodriguez et al., 2010; Steinem, 2013) that what has been written out of sociology, including by Bauman, who generally adhered to a version of Frankfurt School-inspired Critical Theory, is that the development of the West, far from being an endogamous set of processes, was inextricably bound up with colonial and imperialist exploitation (in the case of India, see Tharoor, 2018), including slavery. The identity of ‘the West’ as developed, civilised, rational, white and masculine was enabled only by the negative treatment of ‘the Rest’ (Hall, 1992; Rattansi, 1997) as non-white (and mostly as ‘black’), primitive, irrational, female and infantile.

In my book on Bauman I provide a detailed elaboration of the lack of awareness of these issues in Bauman’s voluminous output, including in his understanding of the Holocaust, where the importance of German imperialism for the Nazi project is surprisingly absent, despite Arendt’s more appropriate appreciation of its significance.

What is striking about Dawson’s critique of my book is that he fails to engage with most of what I have to say about Bauman’s neglect of the importance of imperialism and colonialism, and he fails to understand that neither can be disentangled from issues of gender. For instance, I have a great deal to say about the interconnections between the wealth generated by imperialism, the relegation of women to the private sphere and the development of consumerism, issues which Bauman’s repeated critiques of consumerism ignore. These lacunae are products of Bauman’s Eurocentric, male gaze. Dawson does not attempt to mount a defence of Bauman’s analyses of consumerism and the neglect of the interconnections between imperialism and gender; indeed, it is arguable that Bauman’s neglect of these issues is simply indefensible.

Dawson’s critique of my own critical analyses of Bauman’s work boils down to a series of arguments, most of which relate to Bauman’s status as a ‘probationary white’ because of his Jewishness. His Polishness is also brought into play, to emphasise, again, his status as an ‘outsider’ in British society and to underline the argument that a simple descriptor such as ‘Eurocentrism’ fails to do justice to the division between Western and Eastern Europe.

Dawson fails to advance any argument that Bauman’s Eurocentric sociology is in any way inflected by his Polishness. Beilharz (2020: 129) argues, without citation or elaboration, that East European Marxism ‘owed as much to Weber as to Marx’. But as Blaut (2000) has shown, Weber’s work was not free of Eurocentrism.

In any case, Dawson, like Bauman to some extent, makes much of the differences between the assimilated Jewry of Western Europe and the Ostjuden of Eastern Europe. But this is irrelevant in the case of Bauman, as he was never an Orthodox Eastern European Jew. He never adopted the relevant clothing nor identified with the manners and customs of the Ostjuden. He had a stronger identity as a Pole and as a Critical Theorist and socialist, and struggled with his Jewishness, something which the recent biography by Wagner (2020) makes all too clear. He was uncomfortable in Israel and left for Britain as soon as he was offered a professorship at Leeds.

While he might have been recognisably ‘foreign’ in Britain, he was certainly not regarded as non-white and Dawson cites no instances of Bauman encountering anti-Semitism. Indeed, it is notable that he was parachuted apparently without friction into a professorship and was awarded the Headship of the Department of Sociology at the University of Leeds. It is worth adding that I am only too well aware of how ‘whiteness’ in many cases has had to be achieved, as in the case in the USA of the Jews, Irish and Italians (Rattansi, 2007, 2020). ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Eurocentrism’ are as much about the adoption of perspectives as physical appearances or accents in speech (Bauman was conscious that he spoke with a distinct non-English accent).

Dawson chides me with the argument that as someone who wrote so much about anti-Semitism, Bauman can hardly be criticised for not paying enough attention to racism. But Dawson misses my point. Obviously, I make much of Bauman’s analyses of anti-Semitism. What I criticise Bauman for is the absence of any serious understanding, analysis or indeed sympathy for the racism faced by Britain’s black and Asian minorities. But this is in keeping with, and is the other side of the coin as it were, to his neglect of the role and legacy of British and European imperialism. It is revealing that in his comments on the Brixton disorders of the early 1980s and the widespread disorders of 2011, Bauman evinces not the slightest understanding of the racism faced by black and Asian British youth. Instead, his explanations centre around the notion of ‘flawed consumers’: his analyses emphasise that the riots were populated by black, Asian and other young people who simply took the opportunity to loot consumer goods such as expensive trainers that they could not afford. What Bauman missed seeing were the grievances against heavy-handed, racist policing, and general (well-documented) racial discrimination in education, housing and employment faced by Britain’s ‘visible’ ethnic minorities and that the immediate triggers for the disorders were physical injury to, or the killing of, a black person by police. The so-called ‘milltown’ disorders, involving mainly South Asian origin youth in the North of England (Rattansi, 2011: 68-75), were practically on Bauman’s doorstep: Bradford, for example, is geographically very close to Leeds. Yet Bauman passed no comment on them. That is what I mean by Bauman’s neglect of racism in Britain. The same might be said of his neglect of British and European ‘Islamophobia’, despite the fact that it is arguable that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are joined at the hip, as it were (Renton and Gidley, 2017).

To conclude: I have not been able to detect in Dawson’s critical remarks any that stick to my analysis of Bauman. His article serves to rescue some less well-known writings of Bauman on anti-Semitism and Western and Polish Jewry. But my analysis of Bauman’s flaws remains untouched. It is high time not only to decolonise sociology but Critical Theory as well (Allen, 2016).