I am Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English and affiliated faculty in Critical Race & Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. I am also a faculty member of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. My research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. I am the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016) and I coedit the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press. My current research focuses on nuclear colonialism in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and North America.
This essay explores the divergent role of Black feminism in Afro-pessimist critical theory. While... more This essay explores the divergent role of Black feminism in Afro-pessimist critical theory. While Black feminist concepts are part of the essential grammar of Afro-pessimism, the latter dismisses questions of gender and feminism as products of a liberal humanist tradition that is foundationally antiblack. By focusing on the specificity of Black women’s labor and its association with a destructive value regime, the essay probes the intersections between Afro-pessimism and Marxist theories of value and social reproduction. In doing so, it seeks to shift away from a metaphysics of genderless non-being to underscore the historically-rooted and political dimensions of Black feminist thought.
I adapt Lisa Lowe's formulation of "history hesitant" to explore questions of recovery evoked by ... more I adapt Lisa Lowe's formulation of "history hesitant" to explore questions of recovery evoked by a photograph of my uncle, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima and later a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
This essay explores the divergent role of Black feminism in Afro-pessimist critical theory. While... more This essay explores the divergent role of Black feminism in Afro-pessimist critical theory. While Black feminist concepts are part of the essential grammar of Afro-pessimism, the latter dismisses questions of gender and feminism as products of a liberal humanist tradition that is foundationally antiblack. By focusing on the specificity of Black women’s labor and its association with a destructive value regime, the essay probes the intersections between Afro-pessimism and Marxist theories of value and social reproduction. In doing so, it seeks to shift away from a metaphysics of genderless non-being to underscore the historically-rooted and political dimensions of Black feminist thought.
I adapt Lisa Lowe's formulation of "history hesitant" to explore questions of recovery evoked by ... more I adapt Lisa Lowe's formulation of "history hesitant" to explore questions of recovery evoked by a photograph of my uncle, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima and later a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining i... more 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.
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