Bauman on Modernity, Jewishness & the Holocaust

Name: Amrita Brown
School:Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
Mentor: Elspeth Mitchell

Name of Research Event: 

The Sadler Seminars
Thinking In Dark Times: Exploring the Legacies of Zygmunt Bauman for the Arts and Humanities

Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading)
‘Bauman on Modernity, Jewishness & the Holocaust’ 

Having read a lot of Zygmunt Bauman’s work, it was useful to see much of this being related and connected through the paradigms of specific subjects - as Bauman does himself.   Following his recent death, I sadly missed Bauman’s last speaking event in Leeds, so I was glad to hear a speaker who knew him well and understood his work so intimately presenting this seminar.

This seminar also coincided with a module I am studying (Cultural Memory and Trauma) on the Holocaust, in which we read Bauman, so this provided a perspective on contextualising the module further through reading Bauman.

The reading of ‘Jewishness’ through Bauman’s work and his relating this to perceptions and fears surrounding ambiguity and the ambivalent responses toward ‘Jewishness’ that results in anti-Semitism was a new perspective for me that I hadn’t considered.  Also, Cheyette very astutely related Bauman’s work on many large and topical subjects, to demonstrate the development of Bauman’s ideas and the way he relates the Holocaust, trauma and identity to wider cultural patterns of Modernity and therefore Postmodernity (particularly bearing in mind Bauman’s view of these as structurally and temporally entwined and fluxing today- for example in his terminology ‘liquid-modern’).

I am using Bauman’s texts in my dissertation, so this gave me extra perspectives on approaching my reading, as well as suggesting texts of Bauman that I had not read.

As a Cultural Studies student, the relationship of sociology with Cultural Studies, which is a multi-disciplinary subject, was clear to see in this seminar, particularly through Bauman’s Humanities-based theory.  Observations of how Bauman’s work could be read alongside postcolonial theory and psychoanalytical theory were discussed by the speaker and hosts, so despite Bauman not focussing on these areas himself, and being critiqued as being somewhat Euro-centric, does not devalue his works’ potential to be read in multi-disciplinary ways.  I found this seminar fascinating and learned much about a subject which I am already interested in.  When they recommence in 2018, I will attend again.

I also found, as someone who is not Jewish, that the seminar provided a lot of insight into perceptions of Jewishness, and how these perceptions are commonly addressed from the ‘outside’ and by Jewish people themselves, and the representation of ‘Jewishness’ in academia.

Aside from adding context to my module assignments and my dissertation, I felt I had learned an awful lot on how Bauman can be interpreted and approached from multiple perspectives and analytical angles.