Travelling Academics: Ethnic Transformations in David Mura’s Turning Japanese and Cathy Davidson’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji

I will read David Mura’s Turning Japanese (1991) and Cathy Davidson’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1993/2004) in the context of theories about travel writing, academic autobiography, and the conflicting relationship between critical positions and personal experiences. Both texts center on the experiences of ethnic American (Mura is Japanese American and Davidson is Italian American) scholars spending time in Japan, working. As academics well-versed in theories of diaspora and ethnic identity, Mura’s and Davidson’s accounts reveal the various ways and the extent to which these theories impact their perceptions and representations of life in Japan. The academic memoir—itself a highly theorized life writing project—offers a critically sophisticated way of looking at nations and forms of national identity, one that transcends the strategies of more traditional travel writing. Thus, as Mura and Davidson describe Japan, they consciously negotiate their own transformations as ethnic subjects in shifting contexts. Nonetheless, it has been noted that writers with the academic training to challenge exclusionary forms of nationalism and Orientalism often produce works that in some ways re-establish such discourses, particularly when the critics write personally. Academic memoir thus often unveils contradictions between the personal and the political and I want to look at how Mura and Davidson’s personal enactments of ethnicity and transformation might serve to track the effects of contemporary theories on race, nation, and culture as they connect with the critical paradigms on which their scholarly or creative positions are based.