Angie Wong, Laughing Back at Empire: The Grassroots Activism of the Asianadian Magazine, 1978-1985 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023), 200pp. Paperback. C$27.95. ISBN: 978-1-7728-4029-2

This neat little book (with a very funky retro cover illustration, hearkening back to the late 1970s and early 1980s) is the latest in the University of Manitoba Press’ Human Rights and Social Justice series. Angie Wong focuses therein on one of Canada’s most groundbreaking publications you have probably never heard of, The Asianadian, that took up an avowedly anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic cause at a crucial moment in Canadian history. As well as an engagement with the existing scholarship on the Asian-Canadian experience, and the contents of the magazine itself, Wong has conducted interviews with contributors, readers, and many others with an Asianadian association. The prose and poetical content, as well as the imagery and advertisements of The Asianadian are given new life throughout, and the result is a really excellent window into a micro-movement that expanded as it spoke to, and inspired, much broader conversations about nation, race, gender, and empire.