Where the Body Meets Memory1995

"In Where the Body Meets Memory, Mura offers a powerful meditation on race, memory, and the physical body that focuses on America, its promise of equality and its reality of segregated lives."--BOOK JACKET. "Weaving together stories from his childhood in Chicago, his parents' rare recollections of the internment camps, family anecdotes, and episodes of Japanese American history, Mura creates a portrait of a community becoming a "model minority." This process of assimilation, however, failed to reckon with the internment experience and its legacy of rage, silence, and humiliation; the result has been a loss of heritage and wholeness for generations of Japanese Americans, whose bodies, once interned, bear the stigma of racial shame."--BOOK JACKET. "In vivid and searingly honest prose, Mura explores how this shame has affected his own sexuality: an interracial marriage, compulsive promiscuity, and an obsession with pornography that equates beauty with whiteness. In facing his own demons, Mura illustrates why the troubling connections between desire and race are rarely discussed, and how certain taboos continue to haunt this country's understanding of itself. The future of America, he suggests, depends upon our ability to raise children in a world that honors its racial diversity, that celebrates rather than interns difference."--BOOK JACKET.