Combating Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia in Canada: Toward Pandemic Anti-Racism Education in Post-covid-19

Canada is often held up internationally as a successful model of immigration. Yet, Canada’s history, since its birth as a nation one hundred and fifty-four years ago, is one of contested racial and ethnic relations. Its racial and ethnic conflict and division resurfaces during covid-19 when there has been a surge in racism and xenophobia across the country towards Asian Canadians, particularly those of Chinese descent. Drawing on critical race theory and critical discourse analysis, this article critically analyzes incidents that were reported in popular press during the pandemic pertaining to this topic. The analysis shows how deeply rooted racial discrimination is in Canada. It also reveals that the anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia reflects and retains the historical process of discursive racialization by which Asian Canadians have been socially constructed as biologically inferior, culturally backward, and racially undesirable. To combat and eliminate racism, we propose a framework of pandemic anti-racism education for the purpose of achieving educational improvement in post-covid-19.

Tickling tensions: Gazing into the parallax gap of the multicultural imaginary

This article explores why cultural branding – ideo-affective market communication addressing intense political tensions – paradoxically seems to lead to political inertia rather than political mobilization. I critically analyse advertising addressing political tensions related to race, ethnicity and immigration, but instead of only following the traced-out trajectory of postcolonial theory, I use the lens of Žižek’s radicalized Lacanian psychoanalysis and treat the therapeutic visuality in cultural branding as ideological fantasies of the market’s multicultural imaginary. Through critical visual methodologies, I situate four ‘multicultural’ commercials in their culture- and idea historical contexts, and juxtapose a postcolonial with a Žižekian reading for each of them. I come to argue that the market’s multicultural imaginary (unconsciously) serves important ideological functions in sustaining the political status quo not foremost because it placates anxiety, but because it doesn’t. Tapping into previous discussions in critical marketing on fetishistic disavowal and inversion, I offer yet another explanation. The political inertia following from ideo-affective dimensions of cultural branding does not primarily come from therapeutic sedation, but from the opposite, namely the parallax object’s upholding of gruesome tension and suspense; a fetishistic tickling. This article ends by critiquing the compulsory use of postcolonial theory in research on racial and ethnic relations. From the Žižekian reading, it appears that the postcolonial gaze is now a punishing agency like any dominant ideology, where the social inequality of global capitalism is deemed a more bearable alternative than the traumatic horror of visible racism, which, subsequently, closes the circuit from radical politics.

Sociology

Sociology is perhaps best seen classically as the study of the development, structure, and function of human societies, and sociologists have long been interested in urbanization and the ways in which urban living influences people’s health and well-being. These interests intersect with other core sociological concerns, such as socioeconomic inequality, racial and ethnic relations, migration, social cohesion, and social control to inform unique sociological perspectives on urban health. Urban environments, bringing together heterogeneous populations in dynamic, rapidly evolving settings, are natural laboratories for understanding human societies, thus suggesting a critical role for sociological perspectives in the study of urban health. This chapter introduces a sociological lens to the study of urban health, offering how sociology can advance our understanding of the health of urban populations.