“A daughter three thousand miles off”: Transcultural Adoption in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World

The topic of Argentina’s break from Spain and toward independence has concerned Argentine historians since the late 19th century, a period when authors published the country’s first research-based histories. For generations, scholars focused on the words and actions of individuals who emerged as leaders of the independence process. These histories centered on the ideals and events between 1810 and 1816 as significant and determinant, and they depicted Argentina’s break from Spanish authority as autonomous and self-directed. Beginning in the 1970s, Argentine scholars led a revisionist turn that first explored the context that shaped the political process and both motivated and limited the leaders and the factions that they represented. As was true with the study of other revolutions that took place in the Atlantic World during the late 18th and early 18th centuries, the focus for researchers expanded with shifts toward economic, social, and cultural influences. By the 1990s, the traditional narrative had fallen away in favor of a recognition that fundamental assumptions overlooked historical conditions. While events in North America and, for a time, France inspired discussion circles and correspondence among activists, rebellions within Spanish America and the revolution in Haiti, which underscored the potential cost of a break with authority, chilled any revolutionary push. In turn, the British attempts to capture Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807, which led porteños to form their own militia that defeated the invaders, focused local ambitions on a push for more autonomy within the Spanish Empire. When Napoleonic forces invaded Spain and captured King Ferdinand VII in 1808, the question of who ruled whom pushed the issue of independence forward. Royalist resistance, regional differences, and factional strife within the revolutionary movement complicated and slowed the move toward independence. Recent studies have again broadened the topic in useful directions. When the Cabildo Abierto in Buenos Aires convened to determine who and what form of government should rule in the place of the absent king, what exactly the council in the viceregal capital represented, who it spoke for, and what its relationship would be with Spain and the wider world was not clear. Recent work has added to our understanding of independence beyond Buenos Aires, comparing regions that resisted efforts to keep the colonial boundaries intact with those that remained linked to the capital, either willingly or by force. Social and cultural studies have helped us to better appreciate the role and the actions of the many whose lives and experiences marked the era.

Sympathetic Childhoods:Girl Orphans, Adoptions, and Reimagined Families in Sentimental Literature Kristen Proehl (bio) Carol J. Singley’s Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Joe Sutliff Sanders’s Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Carol J. Singley’s Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature and Joe Sutliff Sanders’s Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story present substantial new insights into the proliferation of “orphaned, homeless, destitute, and neglected” children in American literature (Singley, 1). As Singley notes, orphaned children appear throughout the pages of Western literature, but their American counterparts display some distinctive characteristics, in part because American literature is structured around themes of youthfulness (3). As Cindy Weinstein, Singley, and others have revealed, sentimental writers often portray orphaned children who create nontraditional families based upon spiritual and emotional kinship rather than biological ties. On a metaphorical level, these nontraditional familial configurations offer social commentary on the limits and possibilities of national community formation. As orphan and adoption narratives evolve throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they reflect historical shifts in racial, gender, and class hierarchies. In recent years, scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, such as Elizabeth Barnes, Richard Brodhead, and Marianne Noble, have explored the reciprocal relationship between discipline and love in sentimental literature. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century became increasingly invested in the use of affective discipline, that is, the application of moral suasion rather than corporal punishment as a disciplinary force. In their coming-of-age narratives about girlhood, popular women writers, among them Susan Warner and Louisa May Alcott, portray and even promote the use of emotion as a disciplinary tool. Previous generations [End Page 295] of scholars, Sanders explains, believed that literary debates about love and discipline declined with the fall of the sentimental novel from best-seller lists. To the contrary, Sanders claims that affective discipline remained a vital subject in women’s popular literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but switched domains to focus on the children’s novel and orphan narrative (2). Sanders covers a diverse array of texts in his study, including The Wide, Wide World, The Hidden Hand, Eight Cousins, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Anne of Green Gables, and The Secret Garden. Disciplining Girls explores how several mid-nineteenth-century sentimental classics, such as Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, help to establish the conventions of the orphan girl story. Sanders offers some intriguing examples of similarities between the two texts but also highlights their differences. The Hidden Hand, he suggests, is simultaneously sentimental and postsentimental (43). It “rewards only male characters who will forego the use of masculine privilege,” whereas The Wide, Wide World “made room for physical coercion as a tool for men” (44). Warner and Southworth both advance the argument that masculine power and privilege are “less preferable than the power available through affect” and limited in contrast to feminine power (46). While men remain in power at the end of Warner’s and Southworth’s narratives, girl protagonists ultimately decide where patriarchal power is located and thereby destabilize it (46). Toward the end of these chapters and others in his study, Sanders connects his sophisticated analysis to the main threads of the book’s argument and, in so doing, makes his study clear and accessible to readers. Sanders proceeds to explore orphan narratives penned by several iconic authors of children’s literature, such as Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and L. M. Montgomery. While Alcott’s Little Women has served as a touchstone for debates about disciplinary intimacy, Sanders turns his attention to Eight Cousins, which has received considerably less critical attention. “The power of suasion as imagined” in Eight Cousins, he writes, “does not fundamentally change the institutions of privilege around their protagonists, but there is an increasing sense as the genre passes out of the late years of sentimentalism that these girls are able to direct power where they choose” (56). Orphan narratives continue to proliferate in the early twentieth century and often...

Both The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life present counternarratives to dominant transnational adoption narratives which mostly emphasize the point that transnational adoption means social benefit for children and it is a practice of humanitarianism, love, generosity, and morality. In The Language of Blood, the adoptee is bitter about being taken away from her birth family. Trenka directly questions the practice of transnational adoption by presenting her lived experience as an example. In A Gesture Life, there is a tension between the narrator’s nonchalance to the practice of transnational adoption and the impact of the experience on the adoptee. Chang-rae Lee does not question transnational adoption by confronting the practice directly. By describing how the practice is taken for granted and normalized, A Gesture Life questions what makes transnational adoption necessary. This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter focuses on examining of Korean-American adoption, starting from a general review of transnational adoption history between Korean and the U.S. and the cultural background of the practice, and precedes to engage in a study on the gender dynamics within the practice, then to an overview on current researches on transnational adoption narratives, and finally to the social context of The Language of Blood and A Gesture Life. The second part consists of an examination of the dominant discourses of transnational adoption and a close reading of The Language of Blood to analyze the clash between the representations of transnational adoption by the adoptee and that in the dominant narrative, and to reflect on the movement of the female body within the practice of transnational adoption. Chapter three includes a close reading of A Gesture Life and an analysis of the protagonist’s experiences as both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, to study the sense of un-belongingness, adopter-adoptee relation, and the exploitation of women’s bodies in the patriarchal ideology as involved in transnational adoption. Chapter four concludes the thesis with a suggestion that the transnational adoption narrative should be an open one to include more heterogeneous experiences in order to educate people about what is involved and at stake in the practice of transnational adoption and to demand a rethinking on the practice of transnational adoption.

Like creating families through transracial marriage, transnational adoption also involves a series of decisions made among adult parties. However, in the case of transnational adoption, intermediary parties — adoption agencies — have a strong presence in the decision-making process. In order for prospective adoptive parents to complete the transnational adoption process, they need to follow many bureaucratic steps, compile complicated documents, and take hours of required training classes as recommended by the US Citizenship Immigration Services [USCIS] (2005). Given the complex process transnational adoption requires, most transnational adoption placements are facilitated by adoption agencies. This chapter examines how adoption agencies promote transnational adoption. I will analyze how adoption agencies acquire necessary knowledge to help prospective adoptive parents not only in making their decisions, but also in preparing them for multicultural and multiracial families.KeywordsAdoptive ParentAgency StaffAdopted ChildProspective ParentAdoptive FamilyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

China Adoption By Jenna Cook Introduction In compiling this short bibliography of core sources related to China Adoption, I took particular care to include the perspectives and voices of all triad members: birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents. I have chosen to exclude works on adoption in late imperial China and to focus, instead, on adoption after the implementation of the One Child Policy in 1979. Many of the works I have included make efforts to examine the complex sociopolitical and cultural structures underlying this policy and its resulting effect on infant abandonment and adoption. Although a few sources touch upon domestic Chinese adoption, the majority of sources focus on international (i.e. transnational or intercountry) adoption from China. The selections here are methodologically diverse, encompassing personal narratives, literary analysis, psychological studies, population demography, anthropological ethnography, sociological surveys, and documentary film, and include a broad range of topics such as orphanage care, child trafficking, birth parent search, and beyond. Throughout such variety, the role of gender, race, and class—images of female adoptees reared by upper-middle-class, white parents—consistently underlie each analysis. Adams,Gregory,RichardTessler,andGailGamache.“TheDevelopment of Ethnic Identity among Chinese Adoptees: Paradoxical Effects of School Diversity.” Adoption Quarterly 8.3 (2005): 25–46. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. Anagnost, Ann. “Family Violence and Magical Violence: The Woman as Victim in China’s One-Child Birth Policy.” Women and Language 9.2 (1988): 16–22. ProQuest. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. ---. “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption.” Positions 8.2 (2000): 389­ –421. Duke UP Journals Online. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. ---. “Maternal Labor in a Transnational Circuit.” Consuming Motherhood. Ed. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 139–67. Print. Cook, “China” 53 Andrew, Anita M. “China’s Abandoned Children and Transnational Adoption: Issues and Problems for U.S.-China Relations, Adoption Agencies, and Adoptive Parents.” Journal of Women’s History 19.1 (2007): 123–31, 249. GenderWatch. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. Bebiroglu, Neda, and Ellen E. Pinderhughes. “Mothers Raising Daughters: New Complexities in Cultural Socialization for Children Adopted from China.” Adoption Quarterly 15.2 (2012): 116–39. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. Chatham-Carpenter, April. “‘It Was Like This, I Think’: Constructing an Adoption Narrative for Chinese Adopted Children.” Adoption Quarterly 15.3 (2012): 157–84. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. China Connection: A Journal for New England Families Who Have Adopted Children From China. Published bi-/tri-annually from 1995 to 2008. 1995-2001, Ed. Julie Michaels. 2002–2008, Ed. Melissa Ludtke. Print. China’s Lost Girls. Dir. Allan Myers. Perf. Lisa Ling. National Geographic, 2004. DVD. Choy,CatherineCeniza.GlobalFamilies:AHistoryofAsianInternational Adoption in America. New York: New York UP, 2013. Print. Daughter’s Return. Dir. Changfu Chang. Love without Boundaries, 2011. DVD. Dorow, Sara. “‘China R Us?’: Care, Consumption, and Transnationally Adopted Children.” Symbolic Childhood. Ed. D. Cook. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 149–68. Print. ---. “Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the ‘White Noise’ of Blackness.” Critical Sociology 32.2-3 (2006): 357­–79. SAGE Journals. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. ---. Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print. Dorow, Sara, and Amy Swiffen. “Blood and Desire: The Secret of Heteronormativity in Adoption Narratives of Culture.” American Ethnologist 36.3 (2009): 563–73. Wiley Online Library. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. Dowling, Monica, and Gill Brown. “Globalization and International Adoption from China.” Child and Family Social Work 14.3 (2009): 352­–61. Wiley Online Library. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 54 Evans, Karin. The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past. New York: Putnam, 2000. Print. Found in China. Dir. Carolyn Stanek. Tai-Kai Productions, 2007. DVD. Gammage, Jeff. China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print. Greenhalgh, Susan. “Controlling Births and Bodies in Village China.” American Ethnologist 21.1 (1994): 3–30. JSTOR. Web. 10 Jul. 2013. ---. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print...

Reviewed by: Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption Eleana Kim Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 264 pp. Transnational adoption first emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry in the late 1990s and early 2000s as large numbers of children joined the intensified flows of people, commodities, ideas, and capital that constitute “globalization.” Not only their numbers, but also their destinations made these border-crossing children increasingly difficult to ignore, as they entered into the home territories of Western anthropologists. Moreover, they troubled the boundaries among various categories of traveling things, raising questions about the nature of these circulations: are children in transnational adoption immigrants, commodities, fantasies, conduits of economic and social capital, or all of the above? Do their migrations and attempts at government regulation represent a liberalization of identity and family forms, or the consolidation of a Western-dominated vision of “right” children and families? For more than a decade, Barbara Yngvesson’s work has been among the most valuable in providing critical theoretical frameworks for answering these questions. Her impressively expansive project attends to the complexity of adoption for all the social actors involved––parents, children, social workers, and child welfare advocates on both sides of the global North-South divide––as well as the legal technologies, international networks, and affective economies that govern it. Belonging in an Adopted World is a seamless monograph that refines and coalesces her previous theoretical and ethnographic contributions to powerful effect. Yngvesson’s (1997) earliest work on adoption examined “open adoptions” in the US, in part inspired by her own experience with such an arrangement at a time well before they had become conventional practice. [End Page 1047] In Belonging in an Adopted World, Yngvesson writes in detail of the circumstances that brought her son Finn into her family, as well as of the relationships that formed around him––between Finn’s adoptive and birth families. This experience literally frames the book (appearing in the Prologue and the Epilogue); yet rather than merely functioning as a reflexive or confessional vignette, it is effectively deployed as autoethnography in the most analytical sense, demonstrating how the author’s knowledge of the dynamics of kinship and identity––which adoption throws into relief and radically into question––is located within the scope of her own unfolding family relations. Yngvesson explains how American adoption law provided the model for adoption laws in Europe and how it has become the standard in international legal conventions, which promote “strong” or plenary adoptions that cancel prior kinship relations and replace them with as-if genealogical adoptive ones. Open adoptions cut against the grain of this standard, but in the process create a hierarchy among birth mothers––those in the global North who are empowered to choose the adopting parents and the extent of their relationships to their children, and those in the South for whom relinquishment is complete and final. For American adoptees of previous generations and transnational adoptees today, the closed, plenary form of adoption produced the opposite effect of the closure intended by legal permanence. Instead, it generated a heightened longing for the “real,” the pre-adoption histories and relations that seem to promise “answers,” truth, resolution, and plenitude. Yngvesson, as a legal anthropologist and participant in an open adoption, understands well the power of the law to instantiate legal fictions as truths against the complexity of people’s lived experiences with the connections and disconnections of kinship. With this understanding of “the work of adoption,” she turns her attention to the domain of transnational, transracial adoption to Sweden, seeking to capture the ways in which the particular structure of transnational adoption provokes a desire for “the real,” motivating searches for genealogical “origins,” and “returns” to the birth mother or birth country. As adoptees who have engaged in searches and returns recognize, “the real” of adoption may promise closure, but, in fact, resists it. Questions to which adoptees sought answers open on to more questions, and the ground of identity threatens to become unstable. The real, as Yngvesson delicately shows, is constituted by the ongoing relations among adoptees, adoptive parents, and...

This paper explores transracial and transnational adoptees’ life stories and testimonial narratives in the predicament of deprived, displaced and ambiguous existence. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption is permeated with the matrix of adoptees’ primal wounds of the rejected, misrepresented and silenced, in both birth nation and adoptive country. In designing seminars on life-based transracial and transnational adoption narratives to draw a historiography of a socio-cultural adoption power structure, this paper delves into a creative deconstructing of the deeply embedded ideology of a racial and national identity formation. Through a pedagogical process of defamiliarization of the closed system of adoption politics, student-readers are encouraged to critically review the irrationalities and injustice of transracial paradigms based on the ideologies of nations. The adoption narratives reflect memories of uncertainty, anxiety for belonging and the deep-rooted racial and national trauma. A pedagogical exploration pursues a search for human rights, social justice for the repressed and democratic tolerance in the global context. The social reading of adoption discourses leads the reader-citizens to a process of constructing healing or consoling paradigms as a narrative therapy. This paper proposes how to train young people’s minds to foster critical thinking about the ideologies of nations and envisions a socioecological perspective on a global level. The process of critically reviewing a dualistic hierarchy, forced assimilation, and racial reductionism latent in transracial and transnational adoption, ultimately leads to an expanding network of democratic sympathy and social tolerance in a future-oriented harmonious globe.

Popular rhetoric explaining, justifying, and managing transnational adoption from Asia to the United States is, on the whole, warmly positive, characterized by the altruistic desire to save Asian orphans from terrible fates. This essay argues that this discursive formation, far from being either harmless or progressive, is rather a strategic technology of (neo)colonialism, and a durable and adaptable form of symbolic violence. Adoption discourse centered around orphaned Asian “waifs” in need of rescue from birth countries that are inherently unfit to raise them reflects what I call logics of charity, commonsense paternalist and colonialist logics that frame foreign adoption as charity or rescue. These logics are borne of colonial, Orientalist attitudes toward Asia and the Global South, reifying the superiority of the west. This results in relationships of intimate coloniality between white and Asian America through the racialized conditional belonging of Asian American adoptees. Constructing a rhetorical genealogy of public discourse around transnational adoption from Asia to the United States from the 1950s into the twenty-first century, I examine how logics of charity in transnational adoption discourse have structured our commonsense narratives of Asian adoption, shaping how adoptees and non-adoptees alike imagine race, kinship, and belonging.

The initial Swedish discourse of transnational adoption as a win-win situation has changed over its more than 60-year-long history. This article aims to trace and present some themes in this history, with a particular focus on the public debate and the different narratives that representatives of the adoption triangle—the adoptees, the adoptive parents, and the biological parents—tell when dealing with transnational and transracial adoption as a personal and political phenomenon. The article draws from an ongoing study of discourses and narratives of transnational adoption based, above all, on journalism, memoirs, governmental documents, and previous research. It attempts to present the contradictory perspectives on transnational adoption to create a diffractive pattern. The diffractive analysis makes it possible to show how the investigated narratives and discourses on transnational adoption change in encounters with experiences made, and even more so, made visible and knowledgeable, in social practices.

Speculations about the racial identity of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins have overshadowed the recuperative considerations of her work in the two decades following the publication of the Schomburg reprints of Four Girls at Cottage City and Megda. New evidence provided by independent researcher Katherine E. Flynn, confirming that Kelley-Hawkins was misidentified as a Black writer, complicates Kelly-Hawkins's place in the canon of nineteenth-century African American writing. (1) The readings and methodologies of scholars such as Jean Fagan Yellin, Claudia Tate, and Frances Smith Foster have profoundly and irrevocably altered perceptions of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century women's literatures. Certain race-based speculations might now be unwarranted, but the impulse behind the to claim Kelley-Hawkins as of ours is not. If we look to the text, a text that, if not authored by an African American woman, clearly partakes of a similar literary tradition, what we find is not overzealous criticism, but an illuminating application of critical frameworks derived from the study of nineteenth-century Black women's writing. Just as the putative dichotomy of separate spheres has been destabilized by more fluid and complex understandings of gender, race, class, and sexuality, so also must the supposed separateness of Black and American literary traditions be reconceived as having been wrought within mutually constitutive spaces of critical and historical discourses. My understanding of Kelley-Hawkins's novels is not irrevocably tied to the author's racial heritage, but to her representations of racial anxiety and utopian communities of spiritual feminism. Rather than discounting Kelley-Hawkins as what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has dubbed more white mediocre novelist because her work cannot be contained within a singular literary tradition (qtd. in Jaschik, pars. 11, 10), I consider how Four Girls at Cottage City rearticulates several popular forms of nineteenth-century literature, including sentimental novels, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, and evangelical African American girls' fiction, such as Mrs. A. E. Johnson's The Hazeley Family and Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman's Beryl Weston's Ambition. Far from advocating mindless escapism, Kelley-Hawkins balances tensions in her novel to constitute a realist interpretation of the difficulties young women faced in negotiating often contradictory expectations of womanhood, citizenship, and race consciousness. Throughout Four Girls at Cottage City, Kelley-Hawkins negotiates the tension between endorsing Victorian models of respectability, intellectuality, and morality on one hand, and advocating freedom, individualism, and indulgence on the other. It is precisely those moments when the heroines are engaged in consuming--musical entertainment, food, religious testimony, books, fortune-telling, and mesmerism--that I posit as radical assertions of female and pleasure. Claudia Tate's Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, which examines the efficacy of overlooked domestic novels as a way of expressing the social and despair, the personal and political dreams and frustrations of late-nineteenth-century black people, first sparked my interest in the work of Kelley-Hawkins. Through what she terms the politics of desire in turn-of-the-century women's writing, Tate recovers a woman-centered political agency (19, 21). My work extends Tate's understanding of the fusion of the domestic and political by focusing specifically on the radical potential of consumption in domestic novels. More than unveiling sites of female empowerment and agency, my exploration attends to textual moments that underscore the tensions between bourgeois and/or bohemian impulses and the political collectivity of racial uplift. Both slave narratives and early women's writing responded to the restrictions of gender and race by turning inward. In women's literature, this technique often led heroines on evangelical quests for spiritual renewal, while in slave narratives, these inward looks resulted in internal, followed by actual, self-emancipation. …

The concept of restorative justice (RJ) has been extended beyond a focus on crime to such areas as education, the workplace, and the family. Recent efforts of the US to implement the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption provide an opportunity to examine RJ values as components of transnational adoption policy. If we accept Braithwaite’s suggestion to think of RJ in terms of avoiding harm rather than in terms of doing good then we can surely think of the Hague Convention as a restorative instrument as principles involving social justice and human rights align with principles of RJ to circumvent human rights abuses and to monitor conflicts in transnational adoption. Though written and signed by 83 countries in 1993, the US did not ratify the Hague Convention until 2007 and implementation of the Hague Convention began in April, 2008. Drawing from US Department of State data on transnational adoptions, political and social changes specific to sending countries, shifts in sending country adoption policies, and changes in the marketing of programs by private adoption agencies, this paper assesses the impact of the Hague Convention on transnational adoption generally, and US transnational adoption in particular.

In Historicizing the Work of UFOlab Artist Collective Around Transnational Adoption the artist collective UFOlab re-examines and historicizes their exhibitions, talks, events, performances, and public interventions. Through their collective art practice from 2004 to 2010 they contested and re-framed normative perceptions of racism and transnational adoption from a post- and decolonial feminist viewpoint. UFOlab was primarily active in Denmark and South Korea, but they connected with a global network of cultural workers, activists, and researchers in a joint challenge to official narratives around transnational adoption by adoption agencies, sending and receiving countries. UFOlab has consistently worked towards adoptee rights and nuancing the discourse around transnational adoption and its complex global history tied to war, militarism, white privilege, patriarchy, and class. This is the only issue in Art as Forum’s print publication series Kunsten som Forum på tryk to appear in English, since the working language of Danish-Swedish-Korean UFOlab is English, which is also the shared language of its wished-for readership: the collective’s friends and peers in the circles of the Korean adopted diaspora transgressing any single national reading public.

The first transnational adoptions to the United States or “intercountry” as they were originally called, began in the wake of World War II, but it was not until after the Korean War that international adoption to the United States became institutionalized. Transnational adoption changed ideas around family and kinship as children were not only being adopted cross-nationally but also cross-racially. Because transnational adoption quickly began to transgress the race-matching procedures that guided initial intercountry and domestic adoptions, this new form of family making drew both public attention and research interests. This article primarily focuses on transnational adoption to the United States and the controversies, politics, and outcomes surrounding it. Initial research studies in the 1960s and 1970s in social work and psychology began with a focus largely on children’s psychological and social adjustment into their adoptive families before continuing across disciplines such as law; gender and family studies; cultural studies; and sociology. As research continued, attention reflected disciplinary foci expanding from outcome studies to examinations of the effect of policies, politics (domestic and geopolitical), and race, class, and gender. Given the growth of transnational adoption globally, in 1995 the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption entered into force with the goal of securing the “best interests of the child” and preventing child trafficking and other abuses. In recent decades, new sending countries have open and closed relatively quickly, though China remains a major sending country to the United States for the past two decades, while longer-standing sending countries such as Korea have changed their policies, resulting in decreased adoptions to the United States. These changes, along with a growing awareness of the inequalities inherent in transnational adoption and increased consideration for first families, raise new research questions around the future of adoption.

What is, or should be, the role of solidarity within the (transnationally adoptive) family? In Spain, solidaridad is a prized value in family life, political organization, and humanitarian action, yet adoption professionals actively discouraged its use as a motivation for transnational adoption. This article offers a genealogy of the concept of solidaridad, a consideration of its enduring currency in kinship discourse in Spain, and a critical analysis of case studies from our respective research projects. We show that kinship and humanitarianism are considered very differently in terms of their temporalities and entailments-the terms, and specificities, of their engagements. We argue that solidaridad's multivocality within the transnational adoptive family context has broader significance for kinship, both adoptive and nonadoptive, as well as for social and political engagement across inequality. Solidaridad's exclusions from transnational adoption reveal how kinship and humanitarianism both involve the work of identifying, accommodating, and resolving social difference. [adoption, humanitarianism, kinship, law, Spain].

Transnational adoption from Asia began in the 1950s as an institutionalized practice. Since, hundreds of thousands of young people from countries such as South Korea, China, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines have been adopted and raised primarily in white families in places like the United States, Canada, and Australia but also Scandinavian countries and countries in western Europe. What began as a relief program for multiracial “war orphans” in South Korea has blossomed considerably and affects countries and people around the world; transnational adoption has become a popular industry that targets young people in countries including Guatemala, Brazil, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Haiti, and Russia. Today, transnational adoption continues to be a lucrative industry, though the practice seems to be dwindling in popularity and certain “sending nations” have recently declared its abolition (i.e., Ethiopia in 2017). The United States is by far the most prolific “receiving nation,” and is implicated as one of the greatest instigators, given that nation’s military presence in places such as South Korea and Vietnam in and around the years that transnational adoption expanded from those countries. While not nearly as many Canadians (in comparison to Americans) adopt from countries in Asia, adoptees raised in that country have unique experiences mainly due to vastly distinctive regionalism, that makes, for instance, the identities of Asian/Québécois adoptees uniquely precarious. Mexico is considered a “sending nation,” and since race and class factors rarely see young people both immigrating and migrating from the same nation under the auspices of transnational adoption (though it is not always the case; see, e.g., the United States’ history of sending black children for adoption to various European nations), it is mostly not included in conversations about transnational Asian/North American adoption. For decades, literature about transnational Asian/American adoption centered on adoptive parents, social workers, and pro-adoption activists. In the 1990s, Asian adoptees around the world began to recount their experiences of racial and cultural alienation, among other things, in life writing and poetry. Adoptees in North America were no exception. Asian/North American authors (as well as non-Asian writers) began exploring these subjectivities, too, usually in the context of examining racial, cultural, and national issues related to other Asian/North American subjects who were not subjects experienced. Across most of these representations—by adoptees and non-adoptees alike—the theme of personal and collective history is a notable focus, and adoptees are imagined as another meaningful example of the paradoxical and complex ways Asian/North Americans’ paper histories, immigration rights, and so-called model minorityhood have been levied. Transnational Asian/North American adoption continues to be a topic of fascination for so many writers and audiences and these representations cross genres, aesthetic modes, and narrative styles.