Description

My presentation reframes the history and logic of settler colonial capitalism through a focus on Asian racialization in Canada and the US. Drawing on an archive of Asian North American visual culture, I argue that the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital’s abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism’s defining features. My focus on the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor attempts to push 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.

Iyko Day is an associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, chair of the Program in Critical Social Thought, and co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016).