Zygmunt Bauman, My Life in Fragments, edited by Izabela Wagner (Polity, 2023);
Zygmunt Bauman, History and Politics, edited by Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzezinski and Tom Campbell (Polity 2023).
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
by David Roberts
Peter Beilharz captures this ongoing process of exchange, fed by the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas between the old and the new worlds, between metropolitan centre and open frontier in terms of cultural traffic. Cultural traffic in turn can be understood both in the direct and wider sense as translation. As the act of relocation, transformation and recreation, translation epitomizes the idea of supplementarity and in turn the question of identity. In the following, I shall be thinking with and against Peter’s thinking of the Antipodes with the idea of translation in mind.
by Julian Potter
Thirty years separate Peter and Zygmunt, another thirty separate myself and Peter. These are generational spans, time enough for considerable changes that challenge traditions. Through my story, I would like to suggest that the refounding of intellectual traditions on friendship, instead of, and sometimes in spite of institutions, or enframed goals such as politics, is one of Peter’s gifts to his postmodern students and those who have met him along the way. Another is the vital question for scholarly endeavour: ‘Is it interesting?’ And for me, the love of books.
by Margaret Somers
I fell in love with Peter the first time I met him, at an American Sociological Meeting, sometime in the late 1980s, I think. This was, of course, love Beilharzian-style – not the amorous variety but an intimacy of shared political intellectual practice. The ASA was a fitting place to meet as it was one of Peter’s most fertile sites for his Beilharzian love assignations.
Review Essay: The Posthumous Bauman
By Matt Dawson
2023 saw six new books by, and about Zygmunt Bauman published. 6 years after his death, these texts were part of an emerging body of literature we may call The Posthumous Bauman. I explore the key lessons this literature has offered and suggest there are four key themes: our increased knowledge of Bauman’s life and its link, or not, to his sociology; the role of the hinterland for the sociologist; the increased interest in Bauman’s lifelong sociological project before he came to Leeds; and the differing receptions of Bauman’s work.
by Howard Prosser
This is a tale of friendship. Or, more accurately, it’s a reflection on how a friendship based on a few meetings can amount to a lot. I am sure many of us have had a version of this experience. The friendships made during a stint living elsewhere. Or those incidental meetings and interactions with someone at infrequent events which, though it never quite blossoms into something more, we can still define as friendship.
Chris Finnen Band, Live in Lockdown 2020 (DVD, self produced, 2021)
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
by George Steinmetz
I first met Peter, I believe, at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montréal in 2006. After the panel I struck up a conversation with Peter, went out for coffee with him, and discovered two amazing things. The first was that Peter was the beating heart of the journal Thesis Eleven, which I had been familiar with since graduate school.
Guest editors: Christopher G Robbins and Eric Ferris with Sian Supski
This liber amicorum, or ‘book of friends’, celebrates Peter Beilharz by engaging with different facets of his complex body of work as an intellectual, educator/mentor, and friend/thought partner, on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
by Philippa Mein Smith
Over the past two decades Peter Beilharz, Thesis Eleven’s Founding Editor, has inspired me and clarified my thinking and direction on two themes that have infused my work ever since we met: first, the concept of the Antipodes; and second, the idea of cultural traffic. I am grateful to know ‘Peter B’, an internationally celebrated critical cultural theorist and one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, as a collaborator and friend. It is a comfort, too, to find that friendship and collaboration continues effortlessly as it evolves through time due to Peter B’s continued engagement both with me, and with my former students and colleagues from the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, New Zealand.
thesis eleven 