Benjamin Kindler

Joseph E Hotung Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Email: bjk2153@columbia.edu

BA: University of Oxford

MPhil: University of Oxford
PhD: Columbia University

Cultural production under Chinese socialism; intellectual history of Chinese and global Marxisms; working-class writing; humanism and anti-humanism; anti-colonial thought

Benjamin Kindler is a recent graduate of the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Writing to the Rhythm of Labour: The Politics of Cultural Labour in the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1976’ examines the complex interrelations between the formation of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuozhe) as the new subject of cultural production under Chinese socialism, and the capacity of varied cultural forms and genres to support the transformation of social relations as part of the movement towards a more egalitarian society. In addition to preparing this dissertation for book publication, Ben is also pursuing a second project on the question of humanism during the socialist and post-socialist periods. It takes up the involvement of Chinese Marxists in the debates that emerged around the question of the human within the international communist movement of the 1960s, as well as the re-emergence of humanism as part of the reassessment of Marx’s early writings during the reform period. Ben’s work has been published or is scheduled for publication in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), International Quarterly for Asian Studies, and Modern China, as well as in the edited collections The Afterlives of Chinese Communism and Proletarian China. Ben teaches courses on the global history of the Chinese Revolution and the legacies of proletarian literature in East Asia.