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A. Magazine and Fictions of the Asian American Panethnic Market
Joyce W. Lee, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
May 1, 2008

A. Magazine: Inside Asian America was the first popular Asian American magazine. It ran from 1990-2002 and had a reported circulation of over 200,000. The magazine’s popularization of Asian American panethnicity was facilitated by an ethnic demarcation of literary authorship. Through the magazine’s annual literary supplement, the author became the ethnic subject instrumental to establishing a separate but equal panethnicity. The literary supplement then conceals and reveals panethnicity’s contradictions and anxieties in representing the individual. A. Magazine believed that individual Asian Americans could be empowered through a group consumer identity. By marketing an Asian American lifestyle the magazine sought to confirm the existence of an Asian American consumer market and a consumer demand for self-representation. The strategies the magazine used to create and sustain the idea of this lifestyle ultimately evinced the magazine’s socioeconomic position and its attendant weaknesses. By examining A. Magazine we are not only able to see the contribution of a magazine to the formation of panethnic identity, but the development of cultural ends from political beginnings.