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Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.  Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.  Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives-what white people must do-to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49746432065809,"sku":"NGR9781517914547","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51032735187217,"sku":"NIN9781517914547","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695763489041,"sku":"CIN151791454XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51856518775057,"sku":"CIN151791454XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/151791454X.jpg?v=1764842221"},{"product_id":"turning-japanese-book-david-mura-9780385423441","title":"Turning Japanese","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49777927160081,"sku":"CIN0385423446G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49851629699345,"sku":"CIN0385423446A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038230843665,"sku":"CIN0385423446VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0385423446.jpg?v=1750781676"},{"product_id":"where-the-body-meets-memory-book-david-mura-9780385471848","title":"Where the Body Meets Memory","description":"In \u003ci\u003eTurning Japanese\u003c\/i\u003e, poet David Mura chronicled a year in Japan in which his sense of identity as a Japanese American was transformed. In \u003ci\u003eWhere the Body Meets Memory\u003c\/i\u003e, Mura focuses on his experience growing up Japanese American in a country which interned both his parents during World War II, simply because of their race. Interweaving his own experience with that of his family and of other sansei-third generation Japanese Americans-Mura reveals how being a model minority has resulted in a loss of heritage and wholeness for generations of Japanese Americans. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn vivid and searingly honest prose, Mura goes on to suggest how the shame of internment affected his sense of sexuality, leading him to face troubling questions about desire and race: an interracial marriage, compulsive adultery, and an addiction to pornography which equates beauty with whiteness. Using his own experience as a measure of racial and sexual grief, Mura illustrates how the connections between race and desire are rarely discussed, how certain taboos continue to haunt this country's understanding of itself. Ultimately, Mura faces the most difficult legacy of miscegenation: raising children in a world which refuses to recognize and honor its racial diversity. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIntimate and lyrically stunning, \u003ci\u003eWhere the Body Meets Memory\u003c\/i\u003e is a personal journey out of the self and into America's racial and sexual psyche.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49911046734097,"sku":"CIN038547184XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50294027682065,"sku":"CIN038547184XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50440368193809,"sku":"CIN038547184XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52735190302993,"sku":"NIN9780385471848","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/038547184X.jpg?v=1751390258"},{"product_id":"stranger-s-journey-book-david-mura-9780820353463","title":"A Stranger's Journey","description":"\u003cp\u003eLong recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA, with \u003cem\u003eA Stranger's Journey\u003c\/em\u003e, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as Junot D az, Z Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Sherman Alexie, while making compelling connections to Mura's own life and work as a Japanese American writer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eA Stranger's Journey\u003c\/em\u003e, Mura poses two central questions. The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Here, like Toni Morrison's \u003cem\u003ePlaying in the Dark\u003c\/em\u003e or Jeff Chang's \u003cem\u003eWho We Be\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eA Stranger's Journey\u003c\/em\u003e breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book's second central question involves structure: How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer may use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50111453397265,"sku":"CIN0820353469G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363512783121,"sku":"CIN0820353469A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763211833617,"sku":"CIN0820353469VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008333447441,"sku":"NIN9780820353463","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51432578318609,"sku":"GOR014273571","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52595970769169,"sku":"NLS9780820353463","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820353469.jpg?v=1766138145"},{"product_id":"colors-of-desire-book-david-mura-9780385474610","title":"The Colors of Desire","description":"The poetry of David Mura has been praised for its verbal music, its contradictions of rage and reconciliation, and its curious sense of hope in a world riven by racial and cultural differences. Of his first book, After We Lost Our Way, Amy Clampitt said, The range and force of his evocative gift are counterbalanced by a quick intelligence and a redemptive and surprising tenderness. In The Colors of Desire, his second book of poems, Mura explores the connections between race and sexuality, history and identity, through the lens of desire. From an Issei farmer's lament for an America he knew before internment to a French prostitute who speaks of her Asian lovers, the various voices of these poems reveal how cultural desire shapes personal history and how collective history shapes individual desire. In the title poem, Mura assembles a collage of memory and history that links America's racism to our sexual culture, whose pornography equates whiteness with beauty and color with degradation. In the longest sequence of poems, The Affair, Mura portrays an obsessive, destructive adultery between two married lovers, an Asian-American man and a Caucasian woman, that unmasks the painful conflicts among sex, race, and fidelity. Confronting the promise of a multicultural America, Mura ends the book with a series of poems addressing his legacy to his daughter. In Gardens We Have Left, Mura contemplates how his daughter will inherit both his father's internment and his own rage over assimilation as she fashions her own identity. As he traces his family's path from a Japanese village to America, Mura sees the rocking unbroken joy of love in his daughter, who becomes his hymn to America. TheColors of Desire offers a powerful meditation on the nature of desire within the matrix of race and culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50350955954449,"sku":"CIN038547461XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001949618449,"sku":"NIN9780385474610","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52331371561233,"sku":"NLS9780385474610","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/038547461X.jpg?v=1750844807"},{"product_id":"famous-suicides-of-the-japanese-empire-book-david-mura-9781566892155","title":"Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire","description":"This engaging, topical first novel will appeal to readers who loved The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Fortress of Solitude, those interested in science fiction and astrophysics, nostalgic for the television and films of the fifties and sixties, grappling with the effect of suicide on families, and interested in learning more about immigrant history and Japanese culture. A book which can be viewed in light of the paranoia which fueled the Wen Ho Lee case and related to the recent protest of the Iraq war by Japanese American Lt. 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Mura believes one of poetry's tasks is to explore the challenges to our identities as we encounter various \"others\" and other visions of ourselves and our world. Mura's new collection of poems attempts to accomplish this task.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Mura\u003c\/b\u003e is a poet, nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. His numerous awards include a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writer's Award and two NEA fellow-ships. He has been featured in a number of PBS shows on literature, art and identity. 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