Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In "Belonging in an Adopted World", Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the po...
Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In "Belonging in an Adopted World", Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the politics of adoption policy has profoundly affected the families, nations, and children involved in this new form of social and economic migration. Starting from the transformation of the abandoned child into an adoptable resource for nations that give and receive children in adoption, this volume examines the ramifications of such gifts, especially for families created through adoption and, later, the adopted adults themselves. Bolstered by an account of the author's own experience as an adoptive parent, and fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, "Belonging in an Adopted World" explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability and contingency behind all human identity.
The tensions between legal (adoptive) relations and the blood ties that were the focus of my research on open adoption in the United States become the tension between legal belonging and the pull toward a mother(land), culture, or native soil in global context. In both cases, I argue, the “as if” relations established by adoption law catalyze the pull back to an allegedly prior (more natural) state of completion, even as such journeys complicate belongings, entangling us in relations that can never be complete. (查看原文)
The experiences of these children raised questions about the conventional wisdom that it was in the “best interest” of the child to make a “clean break” from the post, pointing rather to the complex meanings of this “past” for the identity of the child as he or she matured. Thus, while the Convention affirmed the principal endorsed by laws in Euro-American adopting nations that adoptions should be “strong”— that is, that the child’s legal connection to pre-adoptive kin should be terminated so the child could be fully incorporated into the adoptive family—the Convention also recognized the importance of preserving information about the adopted child origin, and specifically about the identity of its parents. (查看原文)
还没人写过短评呢