Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific
by Jenny Heijun Wills, Tobias Hubinette and Indigo Willing
University of Michigan Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-0-472-12681-1 | Cloth: 978-0-472-07451-8 Library of Congress Classification HV875 Dewey Decimal Classification 362.734089
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
REVIEWS
“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
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section 1. Negotiating Everyday, Familial, and National Multiculturalism
Embodying Multiple Selves: Korean Australian Adoptees’ Experiences of Being and Belonging | Jessica Walton
Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Racialized Belongings: A Study of Transnationally Adoptive Parents in Multicultural Australia | Indigo Willing, Patricia Fronek, and Zlatko Skrbiš
Reunions with Siblings in Search Memoirs across Cultures | Margaret Homans
Section 2. Interrupting Myths of Postraciality and Autochthony
Shared and Divergent Landscapes of Transnational Adoption Politics and Critique: Newspaper Reporting and Transnational Adoptee Interventions in Denmark and Minnesota | Kim Park Nelson and Lene Myong
Civilizing Missions and Mimicry in Sweden’s Colonial Present: Exploring the Construction of the Transnational/-racial Adoptee as a Mimic Swede | Richey Wyver
From Adoptee to Trespasser: The Female Asian Adoptee as Oriental Fantasy | Kimberly McKee
Section 3. Exposing Discrepancies: Racial Purity in the “Multicultural Adoptive Land”
Black and White Strangers: Adoption and Ethnic Hierarchies in Finland | Riitta Högbacka and Heidi Ruohio
Black Identity-Making in Flanders: Discourses and Cultural Practices among Transracial Adoptive Families and Black Native Speakers of Flemish | Katrien De Graeve and Sibo Kanobana
Transnational Adoption and the Emergence of Sweden’s Progressive Reproduction Policy: A Contribution to the Biopolitical History of Sweden | Tobias Hübinette
How to “Kin” the Transnational Adoptee in the Québécois Nationalist Family Romance? | Jenny Heijun Wills and Bruno Cornellier
Coda
Contributors
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Adoption and Multiculturalism: Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific
by Jenny Heijun Wills, Tobias Hubinette and Indigo Willing
University of Michigan Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-0-472-12681-1 Cloth: 978-0-472-07451-8
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
REVIEWS
“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
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Section 1. Negotiating Everyday, Familial, and National Multiculturalism
Embodying Multiple Selves: Korean Australian Adoptees’ Experiences of Being and Belonging | Jessica Walton
Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Racialized Belongings: A Study of Transnationally Adoptive Parents in Multicultural Australia | Indigo Willing, Patricia Fronek, and Zlatko Skrbiš
Reunions with Siblings in Search Memoirs across Cultures | Margaret Homans
Section 2. Interrupting Myths of Postraciality and Autochthony
Shared and Divergent Landscapes of Transnational Adoption Politics and Critique: Newspaper Reporting and Transnational Adoptee Interventions in Denmark and Minnesota | Kim Park Nelson and Lene Myong
Civilizing Missions and Mimicry in Sweden’s Colonial Present: Exploring the Construction of the Transnational/-racial Adoptee as a Mimic Swede | Richey Wyver
From Adoptee to Trespasser: The Female Asian Adoptee as Oriental Fantasy | Kimberly McKee
Section 3. Exposing Discrepancies: Racial Purity in the “Multicultural Adoptive Land”
Black and White Strangers: Adoption and Ethnic Hierarchies in Finland | Riitta Högbacka and Heidi Ruohio
Black Identity-Making in Flanders: Discourses and Cultural Practices among Transracial Adoptive Families and Black Native Speakers of Flemish | Katrien De Graeve and Sibo Kanobana
Transnational Adoption and the Emergence of Sweden’s Progressive Reproduction Policy: A Contribution to the Biopolitical History of Sweden | Tobias Hübinette
How to “Kin” the Transnational Adoptee in the Québécois Nationalist Family Romance? | Jenny Heijun Wills and Bruno Cornellier
Coda
Contributors
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE