International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture

Transnational, Transracial and Transcultural Narratives

Mark Shackleton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319599410
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319599427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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. 

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Part I Native North America
• Chapter 1 From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the USA and Canada
• Chapter 2 Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s
• Chapter 3 “Disastrous Adoption”? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing
• Chapter 4 Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer
• Chapter 5 Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree
• Part II Asia and America
• Chapter 6 Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives
• Chapter 7 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
• Part III Europe and America
• Chapter 8 Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s Twin Sisters: A World Apart
• Chapter 9 Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s)
• Chapter 10 Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction
• Chapter 11 “A daughter three thousand miles off”: Transcultural Adoption in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World
• Chapter 12 Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America, and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena
• Index