Alien Capital
Alien Capital
Embedded Files
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.
Books
Reviewed in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Journal of American History, Theory & Event, American Literary History, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, NAISA, Canadian Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Midwest MLA, Western Historical Quarterly, Lateral, English Studies in Canada, Pacific Historical Review, American Historical Review
Chapter 2, “Sex, Time, and the Transcontinental Railroad: Queer Temporalities of History 2.” Reprinted in Arcade: A Digital Salon, 2024.
After Black Marxism. In Progress.
Journal Essays
“Reading Red, Reading Palestine.” PMLA 140. 2 (2025): 321-326.
“Ruin Porn and the Colonial Imaginary.” PMLA 136.1 (2021): 125-131.
“The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism.” Monthly Review 72.3 (2020): 64-73.
“Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1.2 (2015): 102-121.
“Tseng Kwong Chi and the Eugenic Landscape.” American Quarterly 64.5 (2013): 91-118.
“Alien Intimacies: The Coloniality of Japanese Internment in Australia, Canada, and the US.” Amerasia Journal 36.2 (2010). 107-124.
*Winner of the American Studies Association Comparative Ethnic Studies Essay Prize, 2009.
“Must All Asianness Be American?: The Census, Racial Classification, and Asian Canadian Emergence.” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 45-70.
“Lost in Transnation: Uncovering Asian Canada.” Amerasia Journal 33.2 (2007): 69-85.
Essays in Edited Volumes
“Afterword” with Shigemi Kono. Genbaku No Uta—Poetry After the Atomic Bomb: A Collection of Tanka Poetry by Hideko Kono. Ed. Yumie Kono. Trans. Yumie Kono and Ariel O’Sullivan. Nagano: Mokuseisha Press (2023): 109-118.
“Nuclear Antipolitics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Colonial Racial Capitalism. Eds. Susan Koshy, Jodi Byrd, Lisa Cacho, and Brian Jefferson. Durham: Duke University Press (2022): 257-283.
“Eco-criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies.” After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon. Cambridge University Press, (2022): 40-54.
“Afro-feminism before Afropessimism: Meditations on Gender and Ontology.” Antiblackness. Eds. Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas. Durham: Duke University Press, (2021): 60-81.
“Settler Colonialism in Asian North American Representation.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 28 Sep. 2018.
“Interventing Innocence: Race, ‘Resistance’, and the Asian North American Avant-garde.” Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing. Eds. Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee. Philadelphia: Temple UP, (2005): 35-51.
Journal Issues, Lead Editor with Essays
“Palestine after Analogy.” Special Issue Co-edited with Nasser Abourahme. Critical Ethnic Studies 9.1 (2024).
“On Immanence and Indeterminacy: Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism.” Guest-edited Forum. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 39.1 (2021): 3-8.
”Solidarities of Nonalignment: Abolition, Decolonization and Anti-Capitalism.” Special Issue Co-edited with Michael J. Viola, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, and Juliana Hu Pegues. Critical Ethnic Studies. 5.1-2 (2019): 5-19.
“Settler Colonial Studies, Asian Diasporic Questions.” Introduction to Guest-edited Field Trip. Verge: Studies in Global
Asias 5.1 (2019): 2-4.
“Settler Colonial Critique, Transnational Lessons.” Essay for guest-edited Field Trip. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5.1 (2019): 5-11.
Short Texts
"Property Keyword.” Amerasia Journal 46.2 (2021): 147-48.
“Hiroshima Hesitant.” Photography and Culture 10.2 (2017): 169-171.
“Transnationalism Within.” Canadian Literature 227 (2016): 198.
“Conversation on Unfinished Projects.” Canadian Literature 33.2 (2007): 130
Book Review Essays and Forums
“Crisis Infrastructures.” Critical Ethnic Studies 8.2 (2023). Book Forum on Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade.
“Racial Capitalism, Colonialism, and Death-Dealing Abstraction.” American Quarterly 72.4 (2020): 1033-1046. Review Essay on Brenna Bhandar, The Colonial Lives of Property; Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad; Tiffany Lethabo King,The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies; Rob Nichols, Theft is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory.
Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific by Christopher B. Patterson. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. American Literary History: ALH Online Review Series XVIII March 2019 .
“Alien Capital Book Review Forum” by Wesley Attewell, Michelle Daigle, Genevieve Clutario, May Farrales, Stevie Ruiz, Christine Peralta, Dory Nason, Iyko Day. The AAG Review of Books 6.3 (2018): 192-205.
“Beyond Atomic Beauty: Transnational Warping in Lisa Yoneyama’s Cold War Ruins.” Amerasia Journal. 44.3 (2018): 83-88.
Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America by Toake Endoh, University of Illinois Press, 2009. Asian Studies Review 35.3 (2011): 397-398.
Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-49 by Stephanie Bangarth, UBC Press, 2007. Canadian Journal of Law & Society 24.1 (2008): 132-134.
The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation by Rachel Lee, Princeton UP: 1999. Henry Street: A Graduate Review of Literary Studies. 9.1 (2001): 106-110
Public Writing
“Zionism in 3D.” Daily Hampshire Gazette, online and print July 7, 2024
“Haunted by Answers.” Guest Column, Daily Hampshire Gazette, online and print January 9, 2024.
“In Conversation: Ken Lum with Iyko Day.” The Brooklyn Rail. July /August 2002.
"Exclusion Acts: Iyko Day on Asian Hate Through the Prism of Anti-Blackness.” Artforum. Published May13, 2021.
”Accumulation by Education: White Property and Racialized Debt.” Public Seminar. Published June 14, 2019.
Podcast/Television
Iyko Day: On Asians As Capital. Podcast interview with Andy Liu on Time to Say Goodbye May 7, 2021.
Talking AAPI Hate from a Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism Analysis with Dr. Iyko Day. Podcast interview with Michael Viola and Valerie Francisco for Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective May 1, 2021.
“Prof. Day on Violence Against the Asian Community” Connecting Point WGBY March 31, 2021.
”Grappling with Xenophobia Amid the Coronavirus” Connecting Point WGBY April 3, 2020 .
“Alien Capital Interview with Nancy Ko” New Books Network NBN https://newbooksnetwork.com Feb 10, 2020.
“Settler Colonialism in the Nuclear Age.” New Dawn Podcast hosted by Michael Dawson, Race and Capitalism Project. https://anchor.fm/new-dawn May 14, 2019.
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