Session Abstract

Much recent scholarship has focused on rethinking the relationship between the nation-state and its articulation of capital-labor relations.  Noting the way that national borders have been supplemented by other types of borders that demarcate political, social, economic, linguistic, cultural and territorial boundaries, scholars have debated the primacy of national borders in facilitating the movement of people, money, things and ideas crucial to the reproduction of capitalism.  Despite their vast disagreements, they are united in their identification of a new problematic: how is the proliferation of heterogeneous labor and accumulation regimes linked to capitalist crises?

The participants of this session will offer critical insights to this question from their various disciplinary positions (Comparative Literature and History) and diverse areas of study (Japan, colonial Korea and Okinawa).  The primary focus of this session, however, will be to think about what is new and what is old in the formulation of this question.  All four participants will draw upon their extensive work on Japanese imperialism and colonialism to consider whether the issues that inform current discussions of borders – the violence inflicted on migrant workers, the relationship between surplus labor and capitalist crises, multiple techniques of border control, the creation of differentiated labor markets, financialization and the intensification of labor, the political challenges of the division of the working class and so on – are unique to the current conjecture or can be used to rethink dominant understandings of the pre-war Japanese empire. 

In his presentation, Ken Kawashima will examine the continuous movements of Korean migrant labor between colony, metropole and beyond during 1917 and 1937 and in so doing will provide a critique of the concept of “surplus populations” first theorized by Marx.  Gavin Walker will also examine the concept of “surplus populations” but through a close reading of renowned Marxist political economist Uno Kozo who emphasized the importance of this concept for theorizing capitalist crisis.  Walker will elaborate what it means to extend Uno’s general analysis to the specific historical “stage” of imperialism.  Wendy Matsumura’s presentation will focus on Okinawa, a region whose boundaries constantly shifted during the pre-war period as Japanese imperial interests transformed.  She will examine the relationship between the state’s attempts to include Okinawa into the realm of the national space from the early 1930s as an agricultural region and its simultaneous expelling of surplus workers to newly acquired colonial territories in the South Seas.  The relationship between colonial Korean and Okinawan surplus populations must be thought together to gain a better understanding of how these peoples were managed in the empire during crisis.  Finally, Mark Driscoll will highlight the fraught nature of history writing on the Japanese empire, which contained many different social, political, cultural and economic formations. Through his examination of the repression, effacement or minimizing of the Osaka Incident, a key event in the history of resistance against Japanese imperialism, he will suggest that the high political stakes involved in history-writing are not exclusively limited to national interests as is commonly assumed.