Exploring skewed views of transnational and transracial adoption

Description

Adoption and Multiculturalism features the voices of international scholars reflecting transnational and transracial adoption and its relationship to notions of multiculturalism. The essays trouble common understandings about who is being adopted, who is adopting, and where these acts are taking place, challenging in fascinating ways the tidy master narrative of saviorhood and the concept of a monolithic Western receiving nation. Too often the presumption is that the adoptive and receiving country is one that celebrates racial and ethnic diversity, thus making it superior to the conservative and insular places from which adoptees arrive. The volume’s contributors subvert the often simplistic ways that multiculturalism is linked to transnational and transracial adoption and reveal how troubling multiculturalism in fact can be.

The contributors represent a wide range of disciplines, cultures, and connections in relation to the adoption constellation, bringing perspectives from Europe (including Scandinavia), Canada, the United States, and Australia. The book brings together the various methodologies of literary criticism, history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural theory to demonstrate the multifarious and robust ways that adoption and multiculturalism might be studied and considered. Edited by three transnational and transracial adoptees, Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific offers bold new scholarship that revises popular notions of transracial and transnational adoption as practice and phenomenon.

Jenny Heijun Wills is Associate Professor of English at The University of Winnipeg.

Tobias Hübinette is Associate Professor of Intercultural Education at Karlstad University.

Indigo Willing is Research Fellow in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University.

“A compelling set of essays and a welcome contribution to conversations regarding multiculturalism in ‘western’ nations. It offers not just a comparative study of transnational/transracial adoption, but also of comparative race studies in adoptee-receiving nations. The book will be of interest beyond the world of adoption studies, as it uses transnational/transracial adoption as a lens onto contemporary nationalisms in settler colonial and immigrant receiving nations, where rising xenophobic and right-wing movements, struggles over the meanings of secular liberal ideologies, and ongoing questions of citizenship, belonging and in/exclusion are currently playing out, in increasingly interconnected ways.”
—Elena Kim, University of California, Irvine

- Elena Kim, University of California, Irvine```

“An important and stimulating collection, with its attention to multiple contexts and ontologies, the combination of empirical and conceptual richness that marks almost every chapter, and the focus on adoptee experiences within circuits of language, culture, race, nation, and within unequal political economies and socio-histories.”
—Sarah Dorow, University of Alberta

- Sarah Dorow, University of Alberta