Department of English

• Tuesday, October 13, 2026 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135)

Prof. Day writes: "Asian/Americans have long been associated with a threatening overproductivity: an unnatural, excessive efficiency that devalues white labor. My talk 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. I demonstrate 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. I argue that techno-orientalism animates the threat of dead labor, symptomatic of the crisis of value in the long downturn."