Read more
This book is about transnational and transracial adoption in North American culture. It asks: to what extent does the process of international adoption reflect imperious inequalities around the world; or can international adoption and the personal experiences of international adoptees today be seen more positively as what has been called the richness of "adoptive being"? The areas covered include Native North American adoption policies and the responses of Native North American writers themselves to these policies of assimilation. This might be termed "adoption from within." "Adoption from without" (transnational adoption) is primarily dealt with in articles discussing Chinese and Korean adoptions in the US. The third section concerns such issues as the multiple forms that adoption can take, notions of adoption and identity, adoption and the family, and the problems of adoption.
List of contents
1. Roger L. Nichols: From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the U.S. and Canada.- 2. Margaret D. Jacobs: Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s.- 3. Mark Shackleton: "Disastrous Adoption"? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Native North American Writing.- 4. Pirjo Ahokas: Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer.- 5.Bo Pettersson: Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree.- 6. Lena Ahlin: Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka's Life Narratives.- 7. Begoña Simal-Gonzalez: The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan's We Should Never Meet and Truong's Bitter in the Mouth&
lt;.- 8. Alan Shima: Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen's Twin Sisters: A World Apart.- 9.Rosemarie Peña: Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s).- 10Christine Vogt-William: Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women's Fiction.- 11. Jane Weiss: "A daughter three thousand miles off": Transcultural adoption in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.- 12. John McLeod: Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena.
About the author
Mark Shackleton is Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Moving Outward: The Development of Charles Olson’s Use of Myth (1993) and has edited a number of volumes on North American studies including Migration, Preservation and Change (1999), Roots and Renewal (2001), and First and Other Nations (2005).
Summary
This book is about transnational and transracial adoption in North American culture. It asks: to what extent does the process of international adoption reflect imperious inequalities around the world; or can international adoption and the personal experiences of international adoptees today be seen more positively as what has been called the richness of “adoptive being”? The areas covered include Native North American adoption policies and the responses of Native North American writers themselves to these policies of assimilation. This might be termed “adoption from within.” “Adoption from without” (transnational adoption) is primarily dealt with in articles discussing Chinese and Korean adoptions in the US. The third section concerns such issues as the multiple forms that adoption can take, notions of adoption and identity, adoption and the family, and the problems of adoption.
