Iyko Day

  • Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English
  • Chair of English
  • Affiliated Faculty, Critical Race & Political Economy
Iyko Day

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College.  She is a faculty member and former co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program.  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 and magazines such as Art Forum and Brooklyn Rail.  She coedited the special issue “Solidarities of Nonalignment: Abolition, Decolonization, and Anticapitalism” for Critical Ethnic Studies and has edited forums in Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.  She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective.  Her current research focuses on Marxism and racial capitalism, colonialism and nuclear antipolitics, and the visual culture of logistics.

 

Areas of Expertise

Asian American Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Marxist Theory, Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonial Studies, Queer of Color Critique

Education

  • Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley
  • M.A., Dalhousie University
  • B.A., University of Calgary

HAPPENING AT MOUNT HOLYOKE

Recent Campus News

Barbara Smith ’69 kicked off the inaugural lecture series bearing her namesake on her time shaping the Combahee River Collective and discussed the skills she developed at Mount Holyoke that helped her contribute to building Black feminism.

Mount Holyoke has developed a new major in critical race and political economy to explore the intersections of power and identity that shape personal experience and the world.

In what has become a signature College tradition, four Mount Holyoke faculty members were honored for their scholarship and teaching at a March 2 ceremony.

Recent Grants

Day, I. (2024) One Week Residency and Conference: “Crisis and Urgency: Scholarship in a Shifting World,” Japan Association for American Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.

Day I. (2021) Invited Fellow at the Asian American Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Fellowship is for six months.

Day, I. (2021) William H. Morton Distinguished Senior Fellow, Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College. Institute focus: Transnational and Decolonial Humanities: U.S. Ethnic Studies and Its Global Other

Recent Publications

Day, I. (2024) “Haunted by Answers.” Guest Column in Daily Hampshire Gazette, online and print, Jan 9, 2024. Retrieved from: https://www.gazettenet.com/Guest-columnist-Day-53579030

Day, I. (2024). “Crisis Infrastructures.” Forum essay on Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade. Critical Ethnic Studies 8.2

Day I. and Kono S. (2023). “Afterword.” Genbaku no uta—Poetry after the Atomic Bomb: A Collection of Tanka Poetry by Hideko Kono. Ed. Yumie Kono. Trans. Yumie Kono and Ariel O’Sullivan. Nagano: Mokuseisha Press.

Day, I. (2022) “In Conversation with Artist Ken Lum.” The Brooklyn Rail. July /August 2002.

Day I. (2022). “Nuclear Anti-politics and the Queer Art of Logistical Failure.” Colonial Racial Capitalism. Susan Koshy, Lisa Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, Brian Jordan Jefferson (Eds). Durham: Duke University Press.

Recent Awards

Day, I. (2023) Meredith E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship, Mount Holyoke College, March 2, 2023

Recent Honors

Day, I. (2024) Plenary Address. “Settler Colonialism and the Ends of Analogy.” Dartmouth College, Summer Institute on the Futures of American Studies, June 22, 2024

Day, I. (2024) Invited Speaker, “Nuclear Power and the Waste Theory of Value.” Waseda University, Tokyo, Fifty-Eighth Japanese Association for American Studies Annual Meeting Program, June 2, 2024.

Day I. (2024). Invited Speaker and Workshop Respondent, Eco-Criticism and Capitalism, USC Transpacific Symposium, Transpacific Research Cluster, April, 19, 2024.

Day, I. (2024). Keynote lecture. “Settler Colonialism and the Limits of Analogy.” Johns Hopkins University, Keywords for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism Graduate Symposium, The Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. May 2-3 2024.

Day, I (2024). Invited Speaker, “Black Mirror Black Mirror/Black Marxism: Racial Capitalism in the Green Colony. Duke University, Program in Literature Spring Symposium: Entangled and Incommensurate Racializations. April 4-5, 2024.

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