Presented by Penn English's Latitudes Working Group

Asian/Americans have long been associated with a threatening overproductivity: an unnatural, excessive efficiency that devalues white labor. In this talk, Professor Iyko Day explores the construction of Asian overproductivity in the post-Fordist era, where economic reorganization has shifted capital’s center of gravity from production to circulation. She demonstrates that the destructive overproductivity that Asians evoke is objectified less in the form of exploited “cheap” labor than by the dead labor embedded in constant capital: the infrastructures, machines, and technologies that facilitate the movement and flow of capital. Professor Day argues that techno-orientalism animates the threat of dead labor, symptomatic of the crisis of value in the long downturn.

Cosponsored by the Wolf Humanities Center

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016), and her essays have appeared in American Quarterly, Amerasia, Monthly Review, and PMLA as well as magazines such as Art Forum and Brooklyn Rail. She has coedited special issues for Critical Ethnic Studies journal, including "Palestine After Analogy" (9.1), and has edited forums in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Environment and Planing D: Society and Space. She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indignity, and Relationally for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies editorial collective. Her current research focuses on Marxist theory, colonial racial capitalism, and the visual culture of logistics.