ABSTRACT
In November 2010, Canada’s premiere weekly news magazine, Maclean’s, published an article titled ‘Too Asian?’ that outraged and galvanized Asian Canadians and other communities across the country (Findlay & Köhler, 2010).1 Considered ‘one of the shabbiest and laziest pieces in the history of Canadian magazine journalism’ (Mallick, 2012), the article was widely reviled for depicting Asian Canadian students in racially stereotypical ways and generating a binary ‘us’ versus ‘them’ distinction between the presumptively normal Whites and the academically focused and socially insulated Asians in institutions of higher education. Concerned students and community advocates claimed that the article could end up inciting racial antipathy and division in universities and society at large, instead of fostering a constructive dialog on social diversity and cohesion (Coloma & Lee, 2010). Consequently, many Asian Canadians demanded that Maclean’s ought to issue a public
apology and to establish anti-racist editorial and employment policies. Some called for the boycott of Maclean’s parent company, the media conglomerate Rogers Communications, while others lobbied local and federal politicians to condemn the article and stop the $1.5 million in public funding subsidy that the magazine regularly received. Ultimately, Maclean’s ‘Too Asian?’ article brought into public discourse the paradoxical position of Asians in Canada as an un/wanted racialized minority group. Simultaneously, it also marked the emergence of ethno-nationalism as a disturbing development in antiracist resistance by Asian Canadians in response to their paradoxical subjectivity in the Canadian nation-state.
