Ken Kawashima
Areas of interest
- Modern Japanese History
- Colonial Korean History
- Marxist theory
Biography
Ken C. Kawashima is the author of The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Duke UP, 2009); co-editor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Cornell UP, 2014); and the English translator of Uno Kozo's Theory of Crisis (Brill, 2021; Haymarket, 2026). He has published articles in Historical Materialism, Rethinking Marxism, South Atlantic Quarterly, positions: asia culture critique, and other journals, and teaches courses on the history of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism in East Asia; on everyday life, racism and fascism in modern Japan; and on global Marxist theory. He is currently researching the history of the Allied Occupation of Japan and the thought of the Canadian historian of Japan, E.H. Norman, who served as the Canadian liaison to the Occupation of Japan.
Select publications
- “Beyond Japanese Marxism and Uno Kōzō: Reflections on The Sublime Perversion of Capital by Gavin Walker” (April 8, 2026), Historical Materialism
- “Japan’s 'New Pre-War': Five Dislocations of its Historical Development”, Socialist Register, March 2024
- “Labour-Power”, entry for Contemporanea: Glossary for the 21st Century, edited by Michael Marder and Giovanni Tusa, March 2024
- “Labour Power Matters and Capitalist Racism - An Interview with Ken C. Kawashima”, Class, Race, and Corporate Power, vol. 11, issue 2, Oct. 31, 2023
- “The Anti-Capitalist and Revolutionary Politics of the Late-Foucault: The Quest for Economic Sovereignty”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Nov. 2022, pp. 693-711
- “On Crisis and Colonialism”, book chapter for Ronsō no Buntai [On the Japanese Debate on Capitalism] edited by Yutaka Nagahara and Gavin Walker, Hosei University Ohara Shakai Mondai Kenkyujo Shuppan, 2022.
- “Crisis,” book chapter for the Handbook of Marxism, edited by Alberto Toscano et. al., Sage Publishers (8000 words), 2021.
- “Fascism is a reaction to capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism,” Historical Materialism website blog, March 2021. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-reaction-to-capitalist-crisis-stage-imperialism