Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism

by Iyko Day

In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities. 

Genres: Race, History, Theory, Nonfiction, Academic, Labor, United States

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2016

Reviews

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Iyko Day’s marxology is really solid and she does a great job at differentiating abstract and concrete labor in the racialization of various Asian peoples.

the book falls flat for me though wherein she attempts to triangulate settler-colonialism into only three positionalities: settler/native/alien and then argues that both Asians and Black people fit into the last category. this formulation entirely misunderstands the afterlife of slavery and the afro-amerikan national question. Day states “…yet the continued economic and political subjugation of African Americans seems to exempt them from most theorizing on settler-colonialism, as a “third space” or otherwise” (22). this is simply false — it’s not that there is a lack of theorizations about Black people’s relationship to settler colonialism it’s that the academy actively ignores the Revolutionary Black Nationalist tradition. She goes onto say “If the primary relationship between settler colonizers and Indigenous populations is land, in the case of African slaves transported to the United States it is labor” (27). there is no “primary” relationship between the settler nation and its slaves it is both a question of labor AND a question of land. Her discussion, or rather, misunderstanding of anti-Blackness is unwarranted, but it stems from the fact that “rather than presenting a derivative model of Asian racialization that is based on a prototypical antiBlackness, the vicissitudes of Asian racialization are primarily shaped by the evolving landscape of settler-colonialism within a global economy” (31). Which is a fine argument, but one that she goes about in a weird way in her introduction.

Her weirdness is contained to the introduction and the rest of the book is solid otherwise though

[Josh L · Rating 5 out of 5]

*4.5 Some quotes:

“The historical processes that encode a romanticized distinction between concrete and abstract social relations grow out of Marx's identification of an internalized duality within the commodity. Romantic anticapitalism's confusion over the appearance and essence of the commodity is what Marx refers to as its ‘fetishism.’ While a focus on the fetishism of the commodity appears initially removed from the realm of race and social relations, the commodity is foundational to Marx's labor theory of value, which structures social — and hence race, gender, and sexual — relations within a capitalist mode of production. The chief effect of this fetishism is the appearance of capitalist social relations as antinomical: that an antinomy or opposition exists between concrete and abstract realms of society. Under a romantic anticapitalist view, what is real, sensory, or ‘thingly’ is the tree in your backyard, the dusty work boots by the door, the reliable pickup truck in the driveway. These make up the concrete realm. What is unnatural, nonthingly, or intangible is capital accumulation, surplus-value, and money. These form the abstract realm. Therefore, as Levi clarifies, ‘romantic anticapitalism... hypostatizes the concrete, rooted, and organic, and identifies capitalism solely with the abstract dimension of the antinomy.’ The antinomical view that characterizes romantic anticapitalism glorifies the concrete dimension while casting as evil the abstract domination of capitalism. In particular, the specific power attributed to Jews under National Socialism anthropomorphizes the internal workings of the commodity itself. What is remarkable is how the traits of mobility, abstractness, immateriality, and universality that modern anti-Semitism identifies with Jews are the very same characteristics that Marx uses to describe the commodity's value dimension. How-ever, as Postone clarifies, ‘this [value] dimension — like the supposed power of the Jews — does not appear as such, rather always in the form of a material carrier, such as the commodity. The carrier thus has a “double character” — value and use-value.’ In other words, what romantic anticapitalism misunderstands is that value, while seemingly abstract, is nonetheless objectified within the concrete, sensory form of the commodity during the exchange process. Pulling away the veil of the fetish will reveal that commodities are above all the representations (carriers) of social processes that are objectified in things, and as Marx puts it, ‘its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing.’”

“…Katharyne Mitchell notes that in Vancouver, Hong Kong Chinese ‘are perceived as responsible for house price escalation as a result of using homes for profit through the practice of speculation, rather than as places to live.’ Much of this anti-Hong Kong Chinese sentiment came to the surface in 1988, when 216 luxury condominiums in the False Creek area were sold exclusively to Hong Kong buyers. The sales took all of three hours and circumvented the Canadian market, leading to charges that Hong Kong investors were taking over the city. Although the roots of the city's demographic shifts and spatial reconfigurations are the result of state-led efforts to expedite Vancouver's integration into the global economy, the racial outcome of these processes has effectively reinforced the perception that Asians represent pure market rationality—their desires represent the psychology of capitalist expansion. Asian investors and business immigrants have only economic rather than ‘human’ motivations. By contrast, for white Vancouver residents, as Mitchell points out, purchasing homes ‘secures profit yet does not have to be pursued as profit.’ Only white residents have the concrete, ‘natural’ humanity that allows them to ‘profess ignorance and innocence of any cynical or mercenary motives such as profit, yet establishes their fundamental connection to the underlying systems that generate it.’ The biologization of capitalism thus renders Asians less human, removed from the concrete associations that align whiteness with property and belonging.”

“According to Werner Biermann and Reinhart Kössler, ‘the settler mode of production’ relies on a developed capitalist world market and exploitation of the migrant labor system, a system that has advantages over slave holding because it helps to paralyze the resistance potential of domestic labor. They explain that ‘from purely economic considerations, migrant labour seems more efficient in terms of absolute surplus-value formation and the minimization of the social costs of reproduction.’ Contrary to the notion that migrant labor is an economic burden, migrant labor often assumes the total costs of its social reproduction. Moreover, the United States' longstanding interventionist mode has transformed economies and governments south of the border and across the Pacific and has contributed to the internationalization and expansion of the surplus labor force from which North America can draw. Settler colonial capitalism continually reinvents the levels of unfreedom through the creation of the debt-bound migrant. As Bierrman and Kössler explain, ‘Settler capitalism differs from slave-holding in the important respect that here the class of migrant workers as a whole is, in true capitalist fashion, dependent on the class of settler capitalists as a whole. Although the migrant workers are not personally free, their illiberty is not in terms of a personal relation of bondage to an individual master.’”

[Karis · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because i think this very smart, shrewd, succinct, and innovative work needs to be considered among crucial texts if we want to actually envision new and better systems of seeing people, treating people, and living as people. one of the best imaginative and tangible conclusions/calls to action i've read in a scholarly text.

[Hollis]

Day's reading of romantic anticapitalism mobilized against the Asian immigrant is challenging, deeply insightful, and very relevant for the tense present of North American relations with the global market. Reading this book pushes me to reconsider the shape and nature of racialization, for the 20th century as well as the present. Furthermore, her range of primary sources (both visual and literary) is exciting, especially for Chapter 2 on 'Unnatural Landscapes,' which juxtaposed exclusionary perceptions of settler landscapes with that of Asian immigrant artists like Jin-Me Yoon.

[Fei · Rating 3 out of 5]

The intro framing was great, positioning how to understand Asian labor in context of slavery and settler colonization. The middle art analysis chapters were a bit of a stretch IMO.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx refresher

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

💸💸🕺🕴👲🏻🤲🧐😤☝️ok, so, i think i didn’t like chapter 2, but the rest...omg....

[Kevin Chu]

Taking after Cedric Robinson's Racial Capitalism, Alien Capital moves beyond a binary settler/Native view of settler colonialism and instead offers a triangulation between settler, Native, and alien labor with a focus on racialized Asian labor's role in the United States and Canada.

The introductory analysis is academic and dense, relying on callbacks to Marxian economics. However, her close reading of select works of art and literature situated against Asian Canadian and Asian American history better situate the role of ideas such as romantic anti-capitalism and commodity fetishism in shaping Asian labor's racialization and commodification. In particular, I enjoyed Day's readings of Tseng Kwong Chi and Ken Lum's work.

Day's exploration of the naturalism movement, Japanese interment camps, and parallels with how European Jews became identified with the ills of capitalism upended my understanding of why these things happened. In particular, her discussion of how settler-colonialism appropriated romantic anti-capitalism as a means of Indigenous erasure and xenophobia was interesting. I wish she had expanded upon her discussion of the "high-tech coolie," which highlights a TV news executive from Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. Considering the presence of Asian Americans in technology and the use of Asian outsourced contract labor, this reference felt like a dated example.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good, like a sequel to Ch. 1-3 of Capital but this time with Asians (and dense aesthetic theory). I wish Day made it more clear that settler colonialism is often as antagonistic to capitalism as it is in unity with it, the former a ‘concrete’ and historical social formation which the abstract logic of capital was forced to develop out of. Though this is implicit in the concept of “romantic anti-capitalism”, which is helpfully presented as an organic fetishistic development of the contradiction between abstract and concrete labor in settler colonial Amerika and Klanada, and not a dastardly conspiracy of the evil bourgeoisie to “divide the working-class”.

[Grace Kwan · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of my all time favs and an invaluable resource methodologically and theoretically

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really pushed the limits of my knowledge of Marx, based in an analysis of labor and Asian American labor.

[aerialxav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction, Chapter 1-2, 4

[Sean Lundergan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cultural material that most of the chapters deal with are not my thing at all but the overarching argument and clarity of the writing made it a pretty enjoyable and very enlightening read.

[Leah Montange · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction was really helpful; dense writing; the chapters were less helpful but somewhat interesting. I always have questions about the extent to which we can draw conclusions about the nature of something based on the art that is made about it - does the evidence substantiate the claim? But, nevertheless real smart.

[Abraham Bravo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read introduction