Book Review: The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race, and Gender by Bannerji, H.

Abstract

The Ideological Condition is an undertaking of considerable breadth and depth and a collection of nuanced importance to the field of adult education. I read this edited collection already aware that Bannerji's feminist, anti-racist, and Marxist interventions in sociology, history, and philosophy address several conceptual challenges in the field of critical adult education, particularly concerning our use of concepts such as ideology, consciousness, and praxis. I encourage any student of critical, Marxian, feminist, or anti-racist approaches in the field to make a careful study of her work. This text is an extensive collection of Bannerji's published work. At almost 800 pages, the book includes some of her more incisive and critical interventions in feminist, anti-racist, and Marxist theory. The thirty-one essays collected in the text are organized in 6 sections, spanning questions of ontology, history, subjectivity, nation/nationalism, gender, culture, community, and decolonization. There are several pieces here that, when read in chorus with one another, build for the reader an intricate reading across and between these organizing categories. For example, her seminal essay ‘Building from Marx: Reflections on ‘Race,’ Gender and Class,” could easily span each of these sections. This is the richness of Bannerji's writing, demonstrating a profoundly sophisticated reading of Marx and a recognition of both historical materialism's limits and possibilities for explaining the complex and differentiated conditions of life within capitalism. A further strength of her work is her ability to read other key texts through the methodological insights of Marx, thus challenging, strengthening, and deepening emergent theoretical debates. Critical adult education contends with several central philosophical challenges. We have different theoretical frameworks that help us to think through questions in our field that can concisely be understood as: First, what constitutes the social reality and relations in which we live? Where do these relations come from or how have they emerged? Second, how can we ‘know’ these realities and how can we support others to ‘know’ them as well? Third, how can we transform these relations and how do we articulate the vision and process of these transformations? These are complex and interrelated ontological, epistemological, political, ideological, and pedagogical problems, which Bannerji's work is uniquely positioned to address. Critical adult educators have built Book Reviews