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

Iyko Day's Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism is a tour de force, an astounding scholarly achievement that promises to effect significant interventions in Asian American studies and related fields of study such as American studies, critical ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous studies, to name a few. It speaks to and anticipates ongoing theoretical debates reverberating across multiple disciplines that attend to issues of Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and comparative racialization. Through her close and incisive readings of the works of various Asian North American literary and visual cultural producers, Day provides a genealogy of settler colonialism and its imbrication with capitalist logic and race. In Day's own words, "This book presents a theory of settler colonialism in North America that operates as a triangulation of symbolic positions that include the Native, the alien, and the settler" (23). Reworking Marx's labor theory of value, her focal point of inquiry is the racialization of Asian North Americans and, in particular, the abstraction of Asian labor that serves to configure Asians as the personification of the evils of capitalism and obscure the racialized and gendered differentiation of labor.

Synopsis of Chapters

Each chapter is structured around an examination of particular Asian North American cultural forms that Day frames as part of a genealogical archive of settler colonialism. The first chapter lays the theoretical grounding for the book, elaborating on the abstraction of alien labor through its association with a perverse temporality that does not comport with capitalist temporality. In this chapter, Day draws on Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir and Richard Fung's experimental video documentary and how their works provide a queer Marxist analytic to account for the gendered and sexualized exclusion of Chinese labor on the transcontinental railroad, disrupting normative settler temporality that is predicated on capitalist logic. In the second chapter, Day shifts her focus to the convergence of anti-Asian immigration restriction and the valorization of the settler colonial landscape. In this chapter, Day considers the landscape photography of Asian North American artists and how their engagements with the Western landscape sheds light on the workings of romantic anticapitalism that renders Asian labor as abstract labor and indigenizes or naturalizes the Western landscape.

In the third chapter, Day further elaborates on the abstraction of Asian labor, shifting her focus to Japanese internment and how it marks an occasion to interrogate the shifting signification of Japanese labor from overly efficient to exemplary efficiency after West Coast expulsion and relocation. Here Day draws on Joy Kogawa's novel and Rea Tajiri's experimental film memoir to account for modes of shifting cross-racial identification that inform these texts, from Jewish persecution before the war to Indigeneity after relocation, and affective registers of Japanese internment that exceed the conventions of historiography. In the fourth chapter, Day situates her analysis of the abstraction of Asian labor within the context of the ascendancy of neoliberalism. In this chapter, she considers Karen Tei Yamashita's novel and Ken Lum's multimedia works to explore how the abstraction of Asian labor takes the form of the bifurcated racialization of Asians as either poor migrant workers or wealthy cosmopolitan citizens in which Asians remain an alien labor threat.

Engagements and Interventions

On the one hand, Day covers familiar ground, scrutinizing the association of Asian North Americans with capital and how this serves to configure Asians as a threat to white labor. As Day alludes to, this association is a constituent element of model minority discourse, a well-worn topic of inquiry within Asian American studies. On the other hand, Day opens up new lines of inquiry that have the potential to broaden the analytical scope of Asian American studies and reconfigure the field's framing narratives and cohering assumptions. In situating her project as a critical engagement with settler colonialism, Day brings Asians into analytical...