Iyko Day

  • Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English
  • Chair of Critical Social Thought and English
Iyko Day

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English, and Interim Chair of 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. (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.

Day, I. (2021). Property Keyword. Amerasia Journal 46.2 147-48.

Recent Honors

Invited Speaker, “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” ELH Speaker Series, Johns Hopkins University, October 27, 2022. 

Invited Speaker: “Fourth Worlds and the Art of Logistical Failure.” Illuminations: The Dark Room Visual Culture Studies Seminar 10th Anniversary Symposium, Dartmouth/MIT, October 13-15, 2022. 

Invited Speaker, “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Literature & Legacies of Race Lecture Series, Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia, September 26, 2022.

Keynote Speaker, “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure Symposium, English and American Studies, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, April 22, 2022.

Keynote Speaker, “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Genealogies of Anti-Asian/Asia Violences Symposium, Moynihan Institute, Syracuse University, March 25, 2022.

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