Iyko Day

  • Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English
  • Chair of English
  • Affiliated Faculty, Critical Race & Political Economy
Iyko Day

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College.  She is a faculty member and former co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program.  Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016) and her essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Monthly Review, and PMLA and magazines such as Art Forum and Brooklyn Rail.  She coedited the special issue “Solidarities of Nonalignment: Abolition, Decolonization, and Anticapitalism” for Critical Ethnic Studies and has edited forums in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective.  Her current research focuses on Marxism and racial capitalism, colonialism and nuclear antipolitics, and the visual culture of logistics.

 

Areas of Expertise

Asian American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Marxist Theory, Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonial Studies, Queer of Color Critique

Education

  • Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley
  • M.A., Dalhousie University
  • B.A., University of Calgary

HAPPENING AT MOUNT HOLYOKE

Recent Campus News

Mount Holyoke has developed a new major in critical race and political economy to explore the intersections of power and identity that shape personal experience and the world.

In what has become a signature College tradition, four Mount Holyoke faculty members were honored for their scholarship and teaching at a March 2 ceremony.

Iyko Day, associate professor of English at Mount Holyoke, comments on the marginalization of Chinese immigrants and the spa shooting that targeted Asians.

Recent Grants

Invited Asian American Fellow at the Asian American Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Fellowship is for six months.

Was invited to participate as the Leslie Center William H. Morton Distinguished Senior Fellow in Fall 2020 Humanities Institute on Transnational and Decolonial Humanities: U.S. Ethnic Studies and Its Global Other at Dartmouth College Leslie Center for the Humanities.

Recent Publications

Day I. and Kono S. (2023). “Afterword.” 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.

Day, I. (2022) “In Conversation with Artist Ken Lum.” The Brooklyn Rail. July /August 2002.

Day I. (2022). “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Colonial Racial Capitalism. Susan Koshy, Lisa Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, Brian Jordan Jefferson (Eds). Durham: Duke University Press.

Day, I. (2022) “Eco-criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies.” After Marx: Literary criticism and the critique of value. C. Lye and C. Nealon (Eds). London: Cambridge University Press.

Day, I (2021). Exclusion Acts: Iyko Day on Asian Hate Through the Prism of Anti-Blackness. Artforum May 13, 2021.

Recent Awards

Day, I. (2023) Meredith E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship, Mount Holyoke College, March 2, 2023

Recent Honors

Day, I. (2023) Invited Speaker, “Aesthetics of Indirection.” Asian American Art: Abolition of a Category, UC Davis, November 10-12, 2023

Day, I. (2023) Invited Speaker, “Racial Capitalism and Crisis after Black Marxism,” The Materialities of Race Symposium, Stanford University, October 12-13, 2023

Day, I. (2023) Invited Speaker, “Queering Wastelands.” Post-Extractivist Landscapes and Legacies Conference. University College of Dublin Humanities Institute. Dublin, Ireland. July 4-8, 2023.

Invited Speaker, “New and Future Directions in Asian American Studies.” New Directions in Asian American Studies Symposium, Northwestern University, June 2-3, 2023.

Invited Speaker, “Beyond #Stop AAPI Hate: Toward a Decolonial, Abolitionist Approach to Anti-Asian Racism.” Roundtable Discussion: A Hundred Years Later: Asian Racialization and the Violence of Inclusion on the Centenary of the Chinese Immigration Act: Roundtable Discussion,” Simon Fraser University, May 15, 2023.

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