Iyko Day

Iyko Day’s research focuses on the intersection of Asian racialization, Indigeneity, and capitalism in North America.  She has publications that explore the settler biopolitics of landscape art; the settler colonial logics of Japanese internment in Canada, the US, and Australia; as well as articles examining comparative racial formation in Canada and the US and comparative Asian Canadian and Asian American literary history.  Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, and Canadian Literature.  Her book, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2016) 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.  Through an analysis of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature and visual culture, she 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.