Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism - Hardcover

Day, Iyko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822360799 ISBN 13: 9780822360797

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2016

Synopsis

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.

 

About this title

About the Author

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

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Alien Capital

Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism

By Iyko Day

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6079-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION The New Jews: Settler Colonialism and the Personification of Capitalism, 
CHAPTER 1 Sex, Time, and the Transcontinental Railroad: Abstract Labor and the Queer Temporalities of History, 
CHAPTER 2 Unnatural Landscapes: Romantic Anticapitalism and Alien Degeneracy, 
CHAPTER 3 Japanese Internment and the Mutation of Labor, 
CHAPTER 4 The New Nineteenth Century: Neoliberal Borders, the City, and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, 
EPILOGUE The Revenge of the Iron Chink, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 
CREDITS, 

CHAPTER 1

SEX, TIME, AND THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

Abstract Labor and the Queer Temporalities of History 2

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

— Henry David Thoreau

Fungibility

Figure 1.1 is the celebrated telegram sent by Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) president William Van Horne, an American from Chicago tasked with overseeing the construction of the CPR who became, according to Pierre Berton's famous account, "more Canadian than any native." His telegram is addressed to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and announces the completion of the railroad in Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885. Unlike the well-known photograph of the ceremonial driving of the last spike, the focal point of the telegram is time: it is the hour and minutes — 9:22 A.M. — that precisely mark the consolidation of the settler nation. The telegram, itself a representation of nineteenth-century advances in communications, symbolizes a new national temporality achieved through technological innovation.

Van Horne was known to frequently draw pictures on the reverse side of these kinds of telegrams. On the back side of one of the few that survived is his sketch of a Chinese laborer's facial profile, complete with a long tapered mustache. Surrounding the man's face are a busy series of numerical calculations that seem indicative of Van Horne's financial worries during the railroad's construction. The CPR, now a multi-billion-dollar corporation, objected to the reproduction of the sketch in this book. What's interesting is that the grounds for the CPR's censorship of the image rested on the mere association of Van Horne with the Chinese man, suggesting a perverse content attributed to the sketched figure and its capacity to corrupt Van Horne's reputation. This chapter probes exactly what constitutes this unnatural, obscene content and why it is out of sync with the settler temporality glorified on the face of Van Horne's telegram to the prime minister.

Probing the obscene content of Van Horne's sketch of the Chinese man further, the juxtaposition of the human profile and numerical sums evokes the economic connection between Chinese railroad labor and their low wages. Drawing out the financial significance of the image, Margot Francis explains that Chinese labor was "indispensable to the CPR's early financial viability as their 'cheap wages' saved Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor for the western section of the line, between $3 and $5 million and allowed him to escape bankruptcy." The Chinese whom Onderdonk contracted to work the western section were recruited from San Francisco. Many of them had worked on the US transcontinental railroad, which had been completed over a decade earlier, in 1869. Although Chin

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360799
• ISBN 13: 9780822360797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256