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Abstract: Contemporary approaches to alienation employ the concept to refer to conditions of “rootlessness” and “homelessness” in an increasingly artificial world, particularly one in which money has come to mediate all relations. Human relations among themselves and to the world have been depersonalized, and commodified. This dimension of alienation refers to reification, a condition in which relations come to take an independent existence, and become powers on their own dominating those who constitute them. The many forms alienation has taken – reification, meaninglessness, instrumentalization, absurdity – has made the concept itself instrumental to diagnosing the crisis of modernity. Central to this discourse is the work of Karl Marx, whose early manuscripts of 1844 powerfully linked the phenomenon of alienation to capitalism. In this thesis, I focus on Marx’s analysis of alienation in his early manuscripts of 1844 and its subsequent impact on the discourse of colonialism, race, and violence in the work of Frantz Fanon. In order to make this connection, I return to Hegel, whose work had an important impact on both figures. I argue that a Hegelian-Marxist reading of Fanon allows for the transposition of the additional elements of race and violence into the phenomenon of alienation. In tracing the notion of alienation from Hegel to Marx to Fanon, the purpose of this thesis is to address the actual anguishing alienation experienced by nonwhites in a racial, colonial, capitalist, world.
The concept of alienation is an umbrella concept that includes powerlessness, meaninglessness, social isolation, cultural estrangement, and self-estrangement. For researchers, the study of alienation is a three-fold task: first, understanding the discrepancy between individual values and actions and general living and working conditions; second, analyzing the overt and latent forms of oppression in social structures; third, accounting for social circumstances that hinder or facilitate individual or collective action against those alienating structures. Alienation, Society, and the Individual provides a timely and broadly representative overview of the most recent developments in alienation research and theory. Alienation, Society, and the Individual makes it clear that alienation research has come of age. Further theoretical developments remain important and as demonstrated In this volume, which revives theoretical debate so as to reformulate classical concepts in view of developments in modern society, the concept of alienation is now increasingly applied to empirical research in a variety of fields. Included here are theory driven evaluations of empirical research on migrant workers, as well as comparative studies on differing liberation ideologies in South Africa. This volume reflects the effects of political developments in Eastern Europe on Marxist alienation theory. While Marxist theory remains important, it is no longer directed exclusively toward criticism of capitalist society. New applications include a critique of Eastern European state socialism, analysis of consumer, rather than capitalist society, and uncommon examples of empirical research carried out within a Marxist framework. The book concludes with a chapter that evaluates recent theoretical and methodological innovations and sets priorities for future research. Alienation, Society, and the Individual offers an unusual combination of theory and practice that make it a state-of-the-art volume. It will be read by sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists.
First published in 1970, original blurb: ‘Alienation’ is the catchword of our time. It has been applied to everything from the new politics to the anti-heroes of today’s films. But what does it mean to say that someone is alienated? Is alienation a state of mind, or a relationship? If modern man is indeed alienated, is it from his work, his government, his society, or himself – or from all of these? Richard Schacht, in this intelligent analysis, gets to the root of these questions. Examining the concept of alienation in the works of Hegel and Marx, he gives a clear account of the origins of the modern usage of the term. Among the many insights to be gained from this analysis is a clear understanding of Hegel’s influence on Marx in this most crucial area. Mr Schacht goes on to discuss the concept of alienation in recent philosophical and sociological literature, particularly in the writings of Erich Fromm. Here he finds a great deal of confusion, which has resulted in a series of almost universally unquestioned misconceptions. This, then, is a book for all of us who use – and mis-use – the term ‘alienation’, and who are interested in the concepts it brings to mind. The arguments of Professor Walter Kaufmann’s introductory essay provide a useful background for Mr Schacht’s analysis. In this essay, Professor Kaufmann states that ‘henceforth nobody should write about alienation without first reading Schacht’s book.’
Postcolonial studies, and the rich body of theory that it applies in its analyses, has transformed and unsettled the ways in which, across a whole range of disciplines, we think about notions such as subjectivity, national identity, globalization, history, language, literature or international politics. Until recently, the emphasis of the groundbreaking work being carried out in these areas has been almost exclusively within an Anglophone context, but increasingly the focus of postcolonial studies is shifting to a more comparative approach. One of the most intriguing developments in this shift.
An effective tool for reading postcolonial con/texts, ideology also provides a matrix to grasp the world, enabling collective political action. This interdisciplinary volume reflects that each position is subject to asymmetrical power relations, with critiques of ideological manifestations occurring in intersecting cultural, social, and political configurations.
In diesem Buch betrachten neun Autorinnen die Lernmethode DesignBuild im postkolonialen Kontext. Anhand konkreter Beispiele wird die handlungsorientierte Vorgehensweise kritisch hinterfragt und evaluiert. Dabei liegt ein Fokus auf den Auslandseinsätzen europäischer und US-amerikanischer Studierender, die in für sie fremden Kulturen ihr frisch erworbenes Wissen aktiv einsetzen. Es werden aber auch Projekte von Studierenden aus Lateinamerika, Asien und Afrika dokumentiert und analysiert, die diese Methode als Experimentierfeld nutzen, um normative Regeln, die häufig noch heute von der Kolonisierung geprägt sind, in Frage zu stellen.
Richard Schacht has long argued that alienation theory can shed important light upon aspects of life in the modern world and upon our human predicament. The essays here call for a rethinking of a variety of forms of alienation in light of contemporary dynamics and a clearer understanding of the dialectic of human selfhood and social participation. They call for a renewed interest in alienation theory; they counter the myth that, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, Marx's thinking has been "refuted"; and they argue for an enhanced sensitivity to the problem of how we describe, interpret, and evaluate the world around us in light of the complexity and diversity that alienation theory reveals.
Focusing on the contributions of Frantz Fanon's writing to the construction of a theory of the postcolonial subject, this book engages post-structuralist discussions on subjectivity and explores the most important readings and discussions of Fanon's work. Problems such as historicity, contingency, and the positions of the subject in postcolonial contexts receive special attention together with phenomenological approaches to Fanonian writing. The central idea is to give Fanon a privileged place in social, political, and cultural analysis. The objectives of the book are to insert Fanon’s texts in contemporary critical theory on modernity and coloniality and to incorporate Fanon in the epistemological and conceptual context of the academy. This innovative work allows us to understand Fanon’s writing as key to linking the experiences and critical developments between the global south and the global north.
The notion of the postcolonial metropolis has gained prominence in the last two decades both within and beyond postcolonial studies. Disciplines such as sociology and urban studies, however, have tended to focus on the economic inequalities, class disparities, and other structural and formative aspects of the postcolonial metropolises that are specific to Western conceptions of the city at large. It is only recently that the depiction of postcolonial metropolises has been addressed in the writings of Suketu Mehta, Chris Abani, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Zakes Mda, among others. Most of these works probe the urban specifics and physical and cultural topographies of postcolonial cities while highlighting their agential capacity to defy, appropriate, and abrogate the superimposition of theories of Western modernity and urbanism. These ASNEL Papers are all concerned with the idea of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis from various disciplinary viewpoints, as drawn from a great range of cityscapes (spread out over five continents). The essays explore, on the one hand, ideas of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation, and, on the other, the possibility of transforming, reinventing and reconfigurating the ‘postcolonial condition’ in and through literary texts and visual narratives. In this context, the volume covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and thematic approaches to postcolonial and metropolitan topographies and their depictions in writings from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, and greater Asia, as well as the UK, addressing issues such as modernity and market economies but also caste, class, and social and linguistic aspects. At the same time, they reflect on the postcolonial metropolis and postcolonialism in the metropolis by concentrating on an urban imaginary which turns on notions of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation – as the continuing ‘postcolonial’ condition.