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

Day, Iyko

ISBN 10: 0822360934 / ISBN 13: 9780822360933

Published by Duke University Press, 2016

About this Item

pp. 264.

Seller Inventory # 373503442

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360934
• ISBN 13: 9780822360933
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

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 the Author

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