New: Reclaiming “Pretty Girl”: A Critical Reflection on Heritage Chinese Voices, Identities, and Third Place s

We are pleased to share the news that a new open-access book is available through the WAC Clearinghouse (https://wacclearinghouse.org). The book appears in the book series Practices & Possibilities, which is edited by Aimee McClure, Aleashia Walton, Jagadish Paudel, Daniel L. Lawson, and Johanna L. Phelps.

In Reclaiming “Pretty Girl”, Charissa Che explores how the literacies of linguistic and ethnic minority students have been overlooked or essentialized in United States higher education and calls for readers to envision spaces that foster these students’ self-identities on their own terms. Offering a challenge to longstanding frameworks in writing and rhetoric, Che reveals their limitations for addressing these students’ lived experiences. Employing narrative inquiry, ethnography, and autoethnography, she presents a longitudinal study of heritage Chinese students across English proficiency levels, among three generations, and across a range of socioeconomic, religious, and educational backgrounds. This work considers how standard language ideology has affected their sense of belonging and, in turn, their heritage languages and identities. Using their recollections and artifacts, Che discusses alternative literacies—which she addresses as third places—that have given these students an outlet to write agentively.

Che, a second-generation Chinese American who learned Cantonese as a first language, places herself in conversation with the students throughout the book, demonstrating how fostering a more empathetic writing class is possible when instructors tap into their own humanity and differences. Reclaiming “Pretty Girl” arrives at a time when anti-Asian sentiment exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and our current sociopolitical landscape have put non-Western rhetorics at risk of erasure. With this multivocal work, Che pushes back against these threats, offers a more hopeful way forward, and provides practical approaches to third place-informed writing instruction for marginalized student populations.

You can find the book at https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/practice/pretty/. The book will also be available in a print edition from the University Press of Colorado in the coming months. Thanks to Charissa for her decision to share it with us as an open-access publication. Thanks as well to Lindsey Harding, who copy-edited the book, and to the anonymous peer reviewers who contributed to its development.

On behalf of the entire Clearinghouse team,

Michele Zugnoni

Associate Publisher for Communication

Reclaiming “Pretty Girl”: A Critical Reflection on Heritage Chinese Voices, Identities, and Third Places

By Charissa Che

Copy edited by Lindsey Harding