Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust
Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions
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Book Description
Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman’s volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman’s thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman’s writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.
Table of Contents
Editors’ introduction: through the window again: revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust
Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński
PART 1: Sociology after Modernity and the Holocaust
1. Modernity or decivilisation? Reflections on Modernity and the Holocaust Today
Larry Ray
2. The sociology of modernity, the ethnography of the Holocaust: what Zygmunt Bauman knew
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir
PART 2: Rationality, obedience, agency
3. From understanding victims to victims’ understanding: rationality, shame and other emotions in Modernity and the Holocaust
Dominic Williams
4. Warsaw Jews in the face of the Holocaust: ‘trajectory’ as the key concept in understanding victims’ behaviour
Maria Ferenc
5. Visual representations of modernity in documents from the Łódź Ghetto
Paweł Michna
PART 3: Extensions and Reevaluations
6. Reassessing Modernity and the Holocaust in the light of genocide in Bosnia
Arne Johan Vetlesen
7. The Rwandan Genocide and the Multiplicity of Modernity
Jack Palmer
PART 4: ‘That world that was not his’ – on Janina Bauman
8. Janina Bauman: to remain human in inhuman conditions
Lydia Bauman
9. Janina and Zygmunt Bauman: a case study of inspiring collaboration
Izabela Wagner
10. Reading Modernity and the Holocaust with and against Winter in the Morning
Griselda Pollock
PART 5: The legacies of Modernity and the Holocaust
11. Bauman, the Frankfurt School, and the tradition of enlightened catastrophism
Jonathon Catlin
12. Modernity and the Holocaust and the concentrationary universe
Max Silverman
Off-the-scene: an afterword
Bryan Cheyette
Editor(s)
Biography
Jack Palmer is Research Fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy and Deputy Director of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide.
Dariusz Brzezinski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical Sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture.
Reviews
‘Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust is an essential and timely contribution both to contemporary debates and to the understanding of the development of Bauman’s thinking. Now, five years after his death, and in a context where there is growing critical appraisal of his work (as well as recent antisemitic attacks against him in Poland) these essays offer new and fascinating ways to look back at a key moment in Bauman’s intellectual trajectory.’ – Janet Wolff, University of Manchester, UK