Illume Magazine

Emerging as a response to the project of depoliticizing Asian American interests, Illume Magazine was founded in Boston, May 2023. Ranging from critical essays to interviews to poetry and prose, Illume is devoted to the critical examination of how Asian and Pacific Islander American histories, issues, and identities have been and continue to be shaped by immigration and migration, citizenship and race, labor, war, U.S. empire, globalization, and neocolonialism. Because we believe in reasserting an identity that is based on politics rather than politics that are based on the identity, Illume's writing is fundamentally anti-war, anti-imperial, transnational, and cross-racial. We encourage ourselves, and our readers, to deconstruct liberal narratives of Asian American immigration and assimilation and find what might emerge instead.