In taking the helm of Prose Studies, we are honored to continue the journal’s longstanding commitment to a diversity of scholarly perspectives and to a capacious definition of “nonfiction prose.” We aim to continue to promote that vision of the journal as a scholarly meeting place where readers can find discussions of Francis Bacon’s aphorisms alongside analyses of the graphic memoirs of Alison Bechdel and Gene Yang, and where Victorian literary giant George Eliot, contemporary Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga, and climate activist Greta Thunberg’s writings can “speak” to one another.
(Guidelines)
In the blandly named Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (1947), Yang Buwei begins by declaring that she is a “typical Chinese woman” who is married and has “four children, a very typical number for a Chinese woman to have”; she acknowledges that she has “such an amount of vanity as becomes [her] sex” (3). Yet, the subsequent pages would suggest that she is anything but a typical person, Chinese, woman, or otherwise. Yang was born in 1889 and came of age during the transition from late-Qing to Republican China. Her résumé during the 1910s to the 1920s is astounding: she was an anti-Qing revolutionary with Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui, one of the earliest Chinese women trained in science-based medicine, and the co-founder of a women’s hospital in Beijing...
(Full Article)
Much scholarly attention has been paid to Latinx fiction. Less scholarship has focused on Latinx nonfiction, especially in the contemporary period. This essay focuses on the affective and political function of the Chicana memoir, particularly Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019). I explore how the emotions evoked by such a memoir aid in resisting dominant narratives of oppression. Counteracting such narratives of constraint and discrimination, Moraga creates a new conceptualization of empowering cultural imaginaries. I propose that the emotionalizing strategy of Native Country will provide new insight into how Chicana memoirs can function as and are voices of resistance against the marginalization of Mexican American women. Indeed, mentally and emotionally sharing such narratives might decelerate the constant fueling of a system of intersectional racism as Native Country exemplifies how even the memory of the unlettered can act as powerful means of resistance against the colonialization of the mind.
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