Anti-Asian Racism and the Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to an alarming increase in assaults and discrimination against individuals of Asian descent in many countries, including Canada. A shadow pandemic of racism affected mental health, interracial relationships, and the representation of Asians in a variety of ways. Anti-Asian Racism and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada is a comprehensive exploration of the underlying causes, implications, and responses to this resurgence of racism. While the earlier epidemics of SARS and H1N1 led to an increase in anti-Asian sentiment, the racism prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic was particularly severe. The "yellow peril" trope that originated in late-nineteenth-century public discourse was redeployed to defame Asians as an existential threat to the West. Even after the pandemic, Asian Canadians have continued to face COVID-19-related socio-economic and racial discrimination. The multidisciplinary contributors to this book employ historical analysis and empirical research to examine the rise in anti-Asian racism and to explore the strategies Asian communities have used to defend themselves and build solidarity. This work is essential to supporting the goals of combatting racial injustice and building an equitable society.

Chandrima Chakraborty is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and director of the Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health and the Global Peace and Social Justice program at McMaster University. She is the author of Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India, editor of Mapping South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises and co-editor, with Amber Dean and Angela Failler, of Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning.

Sibo Chen is an associate professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada: Probing Progressive Extractivism.

Muyang Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, a faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and a faculty associate at the York Centre for Asian Research. Her work has appeared in New Media and Society, Information, Communication and Society, the SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, and elsewhere.

Guida Man is an associate professor and a member of the graduate department in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is a research associate at the Centre for Feminist Research and the York Centre for Asian Research. As the principal investigator and co-investigator of numerous SSHRC funded projects, she has published extensively. Her co-edited volume, with Rina Cohen, is entitled Engendering Transnational Voices: Studies in Family, Work, and Identity.

X. Alvin Yang is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in international relations, global political economy, and the sociology of knowledge. He is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a member of the Lise Meitner Research Group "China in the Global System of Science." Additionally, he serves as the postdoctoral representative of the Human Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society and is a steering group member of PostdocNet at the Max Planck Society. His recent publications include a co-edited special issue on the transculturality of anti-Asian racism, published in Sociological Inquiry.