A short walk from the Canal Street subway station in lower Manhattan stands the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Inside, you will find its permanent collection of artifacts from Asian American history and the temporary exhibit on magazines in Asian culture, appropriately named Magazine Fever. This “fever” culminated as a form of activism in Asian culture for many Asian Americans, reflecting their identities in media, representing multiculturalism and demonstrating their political empowerment.
The MOCA divided the exhibit into different periodicals of Asian American magazines, including AsianWeek, AsiAM and YOLK. It also included a center table where museum-goers could flip through different editions of the featured magazines. On the wall displays, each magazine was accompanied by the years in which it ran, a brief overview of how the brand began and the type of Asian American representation that it focused on.
The first magazine on display was Gidra, a college newspaper started at UCLA in 1969 by a group of Japanese American students. Although the magazine originally started as a school newspaper, it was shortly changed to an off-campus publication since the university wanted control over what type of information was published. The students who started Gidra did not want the university to have authority over what stories could be published since the main focus of the magazine was to emphasize anti-capitalism and anti-racist movements.
This was one of the first publica.
