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

In Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonialism, Iyko Day insightfully approaches the analysis of North American settler colonialism through Asian Americanist critique. Operating in a framework that crosses the Canada-US border, Alien Capital argues that Asian Americans personify abstract value in North American settler colonial capitalism and provide a racial target for the anxieties of settlers reacting to capitalist abstraction. Day's argument hinges on the ways that settler colonial glorification of the concrete—as exemplified in whiteness and the nuclear family and revolving around settler appropriations of indigenous relations with place (in which settlers substitute themselves as native)—manifests anxieties concerning the contradictions of settler capitalism. Settlers displace these anxieties onto variously racialized aliens, violently associating Asian bodies with the domination of capitalist abstraction. Elimination and exclusion, Day convincingly argues, are interlinked modes of settler colonialism. "Asians," she writes, "are as unnatural to the landscape as Indigenous peoples are natural. This is the double edge of settler colonialism" (112). I understand North American settler sovereignty to be a reactive set of future-oriented claims articulated and levied against indigenous relationalities, which I call counter-sovereignty. Day's argument helps me understand that alien desires, as queer desires, potentially disrupt settler futurity, and given the fact and necessity of ongoing indigenous existence to the stability of settler colonialism, futurity is all that settlers can actually claim. Settler sovereignty is preemptive. Alien desires, then, potentially disrupt settler sovereignty, and anti-Asian racism anxiously lashes out in the present against the possible displacement of settler futures.

In the first chapter, Day reads Richard Fung's Dirty Laundry alongside Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, drawing connections between their depictions of Chinese railroad labor, time, and money. The chapter begins with an analysis of a telegram sent by William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The telegram, Day argues, exemplifies the role of telegraphs and railroads in the "consolidation of the settler nation" through new temporalities marked by increased speed and uniformity over distances (41). On the back of the telegraph is a sketch of a Chinese worker's facial profile, which the Canadian Pacific Railway disallowed from reproduction in the book; Day considers this censorious silence over the course of the chapter, exploring the ways in which the representation of a Chinese worker is "out of sync" with settler temporality in historical and contemporary corporate and colonial practices (42). Tensions between the signifiers of race and capital—the vertical lines of the Chinese worker's mustache depicted on the back of the telegram mirror the lines of double-entry records detailed on the telegram's front—led to the association of exploited and vulnerable Chinese labor with social perversion, which Day argues fed the Chinese workers' dehumanization as abstract labor (44). Day argues that Fung and Kingston interrupt this dehumanization by framing racialized labor through the interplay of sexuality and temporality, opening up questions about social necessity and the value of (racial) capital. Alien desires offer no future guarantee for white settler colonialism. Alien desires disrupt settler futurity, setting trajectories in motion that displace the reproduction of settler claims to define and control indigenous places.

The second chapter moves from the question of time to artistic depictions of the physical landscapes affected by settler colonialism, focusing on the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi and Jin-me Yoon. The chapter begins with an analysis of Ken Gonzalez-Day's Erased Lynching, a manipulated photograph of a lynching in the western United States. Reading this photograph as producing visibility out of erasure, Day transitions from her analysis of the telegram in the first chapter to introduce the second chapter's argument concerning constructions of settler colonial landscapes as concrete sites of indigenous erasure and of indigenizing purity and authenticity on the part of settlers. Day argues that Tseng's and Yoon's work parodizes and disrupts the setter landscape through alien racial difference. For...