Events

Please join the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity for a workshop with Professor Iyko Day, Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English, Affiliated Faculty, Critical Race & Political Economy. 

October 16, 2025 from 4:00-5:30 pm in Kelly 108.

The Possessive Investment in Asian American Class Power

Asian American households have the highest median income in the US. They earn 20% more than white households and double that of African Americans households. Despite these numbers, the field of Asian American studies has largely disavowed the narrative of Asian American economic success. My essay responds to this cognitive dissonance by exploring the concept of Asian American “inversion,” whereby racial difference is uncoupled from negative class effects. Exploring the impact of Cold War modernization theory in Asia and shifts in US immigration policy, I argue that the post-1965 ascendance of an Asian American professional managerial class exhibits a possessive investment in class advantage rooted in an antiblack, reactionary work ethic.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race & Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is also a faculty member in 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 UP, 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 recently co-edited the special issue “Palestine After Analogy” for Critical Ethnic Studies journal and was a co-curator for the exhibition Visual Kinship at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College (on view until November 29, 2025). Her research focuses on Asian American literature and visual culture, Marxist theory, and colonial racial capitalism.

More information will be available soon.