Overview

In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities.

Full Product Details

9780822360933

Table of Contents

Reviews

Alien Capital is a persuasive and thought-provoking study, challenging scholars to rethink historical interpretations of settler colonialism, immigration, labor, and race in North America. -- Allan E. S. Lumba * Western Historical Quarterly * Day deftly retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. . . . [A] valuable resource. -- Sumiko Braun * Amerasia Journal * Ikyo Day's book will take its place amongst important work that theorizes, historicizes and offers a way to speak to the intersections of capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and migration in white settler contexts. -- Kevin Bruyneel * Theory & Event *

Featuring elegant and erudite readings of an impressive variety of texts by Asian artists from the United States and Canada alongside brilliant theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and racial capital, Iyko Day's Alien Capital is an immensely important and innovative work. With groundbreaking and profound interventions, Day convincingly demonstrates that we cannot fully understand settler colonialism without considering Asian racialization. --Grace Kyungwon Hong, author of Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

Author Information

Iyko Day is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. 

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