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English

Iyko Day

Elizabeth C. Small Associate Professor of English; Chair of Critical Social Thought

Specialization:

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

Iyko Day is Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College and Faculty Member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016) and she co-edits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationalityfor Temple University Press. Her current projects examine the cultures of global Sinophobia; nuclear colonialism in North America, Africa, and Asia; and the aesthetics of racial capitalism.

Recent Campus News

Anti-Asian violence continues to grow

Iyko Day, Mount Holyoke associate professor of English, talks about anti-Asian hate in America on NEPM’s Connecting Point.

The rise of COVID-19 and anti-Asian bias

Mount Holyoke professor Iyko Day argues that the rise in anti-Asian sentiment is fueled by both current leadership and capitalist principles.

Calling out xenophobia in “China virus”

English professor Iyko Day explains the inherent racism in referring to the new coronavirus as the “China virus.”

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. (2021). On Immanence and Indeterminacy: Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 39(1), 3-8.

Day, I. (2021). Ruin Porn and the Colonial Imaginary. PMLA 136(1), 125-131.

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

Day, I. (2021). Afro-feminism before Afropessimism: Meditations on Gender and Ontology. Antiblackness. Eds. Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas. Durham: Duke University Press, 60-81.

Day, I. (2020). The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism. Monthly Review, 72(3), 64-73.

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Recent Honors

Was interviewed on WGBY's Connecting Point on March 31, 2021 in "Prof. Iyko Day on Violence Against the Asian Community."

Was elected to the American Studies Association National Council.

Gave a lecture, "Anti-Asian Racism and Settler Colonial Racial Capitalism: A Response to the Atlanta Shootings." at Washington and Lee University on March 31, 2021. Sponsored by East Asian Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies, and the Center for International Education.

“The Neoliberal University and Academic Feminism,” GCWS Feminisms Unbound Panel Series, Livestreamed September 17, 2020.

“COVID-19 and Viral Racism,” Lecture and Workshop. Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows, The Ohio State University, Livestreamed September 22, 2020.