Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism by Iyko Day (review)

IN ALIEN CAPITAL, Iyko Day offers readers insightful, intersectional cultural criticism that examines how Asian American and Asian Canadian literary and visual cultures expose and rupture settler-colonial capitalist logics. Joining a growing body of literature that complicates the Native/settler binary framing settler-colonial studies, Day develops a model for understanding settler-colonialism that is triangulated through white, Indigenous, and "alien" subject positions. The alien refers to the racialized migrant on whose labor settler capitalism relies. Like Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks, which draws attention to how settler-colonialism is constitutive of capitalism in the United States and Canada, Day hones in on the settler-colonial organization of racial capitalism in North America, where Indigenous claims to land and an ongoing demand for labor shape the contours of capitalist production. Alien Capital is particularly concerned with romantic anticapitalism as a key dimension of settler-colonial logic. Romantic anticapitalism refers to the conflation of capitalism with the objects capitalism fetishizes (for example, machines). Within romantic anticapitalist discourses, Asian bodies, due to their perceived hyper-efficiency, come to signify the evils of capitalism. This leads Day to argue that capitalism does not merely obscure—or make abstract—the concrete relations of race, gender, and sexuality through which it is characterized, but that this abstraction is constituted through the racialization of the Asian body.

Alien Capital consists of an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. In concise and elegant prose, each chapter analyzes two Asian diasporic literary or visual texts, one American and Canadian. Day's methodology for studying Asian North America is transnational—not merely comparative—with settler-colonial capitalism as the bridging frame. As she outlines in the introduction, Day's interpretations of the cultural texts foreground their white settler-colonial capitalist contexts. Her careful readings show how these cultural productions expose and challenge a central feature of settler capitalist logics: namely, that Asians embody the abstraction of capitalism. In chapter 1, Day analyzes Richard Fung's experimental video documentary Dirty Laundry alongside Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains," from her experimental memoir China Men. Her focus here is on how these two texts queerly disrupt the linear constructions of time and national history—constitutive of settler capitalism—that position Asians as efficient in their use of labor-time. Turning to the visual art of Tseng Kwong Chi and Jin-Me Yoon, the second chapter draws on the late José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification to examine how the respective artists' parodic repetitions of settler landscapes expose and destabilize their meanings. Next, Day turns to the transformation of constructions of Japanese labor vis-à-vis internment. Chapter 3, which looks at Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan and Rea Tajiri's experimental film memoir History and Memory, will be of especial interest to NAIS readers due to its relational analysis of white, Indigenous, and Japanese diasporic subjectivity. Day's discussion of Kogawa and Tajiri's texts illuminates the cultural transformation of Japanese diasporas in North America, from foreign "yellow peril" (pre-internment) to Indigenized surplus labor (post-internment). Day suggests that this transformation was conditioned through identifications of Japanese populations with Jews prior to internment, and identifications with Indigenous peoples following expulsion and relocation. In chapter 4, Day turns to work by multimedia artist Ken Lum and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange in order to discern how late capitalism continues settler imperatives to exploit Asian labor, while fetishizing Asian bodies as the embodiment of capital. The book concludes with an epilogue reflecting on Tommy Ting's sculpture, Machine, and its challenges to capitalism's mystification of the relationship between labor and value.

Alien Capital offers readers a compelling look at how racialization, capitalism and settler-colonialism are intertwined. Given the triangulated model of settler—Indigenous—alien through which it investigates these linkages, however, I do wish that the book had situated itself in relation to the germinal work of scholars...