Zygmunt Baumann is often celebrated as one of the foremost critical thinkers of the 20^th century. A prolific author, Baumann has made numerous interventions around questions ranging from consumerism to morality. Among his most notable interventions has been an engagement with modernity. Informed by various strains of critical thinking, including those of Freud and Marx, his work developed elaborate analyses and critiques of the modern condition putting forth its various misrecognitions, limitations, and false promises.

Despite its acclaimed contributions, Baumann’s analysis of modernity has a noteworthy absence: historical and ongoing colonialism, imperialism, and global inequality between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, a formidable absence of ‘the rest of the world’ looms throughout Bauman’s work. As post, anti, and de-colonial scholars have extensively argued, Europe is a product of colonisation. As Bhambra (2007) explains, European modernity was only made possible through the colonial encounter. Without the extraction, resources, wealth, and expansion of colonialism Europe would not be, and nor would modernity. As Baumann’s concerns revolved around understanding European modernity by limiting it to an inter-European analysis, Europe’s connectivity to its Others and its constitution through them is systematically erased. Consequently, mis-conceptualisations, blind-spots, and misrecognition plague theorisations such as those of Baumann.

Throughout Baumann’s work, examples of this can be found. In thinking ‘the stranger’ Baumann fails to analyse and examine the construction of this figure outside of Europe and the nation-state itself. From enslaved Africans and murdered indigenous communities to today’s non-European refugees and migrant, absences and erasure that would if incorporated radically shift the theorisation and conceptualisation being offered haunt. Indeed, for Baumann, difference produces ambivalence, while in de-colonial thought this produced difference produces modernity itself. Raising the question of ‘human togetherness’ as an issue of modernity, Baumann misses the rampant dehumanisation of indigenous communities around the world as necessary foundation for the invention of the Eurocentric hegemonic category of the human itself.

The clearest example of this might be Baumann’s engagement with the Holocaust as a key moment in understanding modernity. As a Jewish person himself, and someone whose family witnessed and experienced the brunt of Nazi Germany, Goffman was greatly occupied by the Holocuast in particular, and World War 2 more generally. Yet, as Jurgen Zimmerer (2008) and others argue, the Holocaust must be understood as a colonial form: the application of a technique long used and developed outside of Europe on non-Europeans. Erasing this longer history, and engaging with the modern condition, Baumann, particularly in his books on modernity, treats the holocaust as a result that comes after the fact of modernity, rather than as a form of power and control that constituted it – and continue to do so in various forms across the globe. While Baumann importantly realised that atrocities and destruction as seen in the World Wars were not external to modernity, as many claimed, but were rather made possible by modernity, a de-colonial analysis would rather show that that genocide, epistemicide and destruction were constitutive of modernity itself, rather than merely being made possible by it. Indeed, it would make visible how they are the necessary processes and institutions through which modernity is produced and reproduced. From this position, Bauman’s lack of engagement with the colonial question as the key question prevents him from theorising modernity and engaging it as the global structure of power it is.

De-colonial scholars have suggested the distinction between external and internal (in relation to the Eurocentric epistemology) forms of critical thought and theory. Baumann’s critique is an internal one. From remaining confined to European epistemology, accepting its linear narrative of time, and celebrating its so-called achievements to its erasure of Europe connectivity to the rest of the globe. As the decolonisation movement makes progress, multiple attempts have been made for a conversation between Baumann’s work and anti, post, and de-colonial thought. For example, the Baumann institute at the University of Leeds in the UK organised a conference in 2020 titled ‘Postcolonial  Goffman’. The potential of such conversations and their generative ability to advance liberatory theorisation remains to be seen.