Representations of transnational adoption in contemporary American literature and film.
详细信息
文摘
Representations of Transnational Adoption in Contemporary American Literature and Film argues that transnational adoption, as a historically specific new type of American domesticity, is negotiating within the American collective imaginary the American nations terms of engagement with the globalized world. The dissertation analyzes two distinctive literary and cinematic narrative modes of transnational adoption representation in the U.S.---rescue narratives which typically represent the adoptive parents point of view and portray transnational adoption as child rescue) and search narratives which represent the perspective of the adult transnational adoptee seeking to re-establish a connection with birth parents and/or birth culture). Drawing on Fredric Jamesons understanding of literature as a "symbolic act," I read transnational adoption narratives as formal aesthetic resolutions to the incapacity of contemporary kinship to contain the complex structure of the transnational adoptive family. I argue that sentimental and humanitarian rescue discourses in transnational adoption narratives serve as codes of resignification to obscure the roles of the expanding global capitalism and ensuing global and national ideologies as determining forces behind the structures of feeling which sustain the practice of transnational adoption. Chapter 1 argues that adoptive parents memoirs, The Russian Word for Snow 2002) by Janice Cooke Newman, Meeting Sophie 2003) by Nancy McCabe, and The Baby Boat 1998) by Patty Dunn employ rescue rhetoric prevalent in American transnational adoption discourse of the 1950-90s to facilitate incorporation of the adopted childs difference into a local community and American nation. I claim that representational strategies in a rescue narrative serve to sentimentalize and decommodify the process of a childs transfer to a privileged place of nurture in order to legitimate the transnational adoptive family in American culture. Two memoirs analyzed in Chapter 2---Jane Jeong Trenkas The Language of Blood 2003) and Katy Robinsons A Single Square Picture 2002)---depict transnational adoptees confusion over self-identification, their searches for their birth families, and subsequent reunions. These transnational adoptees memoirs reflect the distinctive condition of adoptee authors whose identities have been shaped by alienation due to racialization in their adoptive culture, their inability to align themselves fully with their birth culture or nation, and their estrangement from histories of immigrant communities in America. Chapter 2 demonstrates that in the process of writing about their search, transnational adoptees are reconstructing their identities and renegotiating their relationships with adoptive and birth families, cultures, and nations. Chapter 3 turns to cinematic search narratives---First Person Plural 2000) by Deann Borshay Liem and Daughter from Danang 2002) by Gale Dolgin and Vicente Franco---and examines the consequences of the transnational adoptees gaining or ceding control over self)representation. Using Bill Nicholss classifications of the modes of documentary cinema, I demonstrate that the interactive mode employed by Borshay Liem reinforces her directorial control over representing her adoption and birth family reunion experiences. The observational mode of Daughter from Danang, however, casts the adoptee as a character and ultimately deprives her of self-representational power. Thus, I argue that different outcomes of transnational adoptees reunions with the birth families---adoptee and director Borshay Liem realizes the necessity to redefine her relationship with the birth family, while Hedi Bub chooses not to maintain contact with hers---depend not only on the adoptees unique psychological, historical, and cultural situations, but also on the representational strategies employed in the making of the documentaries. Chapter 4 analyzes the possibilities for the representation of birth parents in rescue and search narratives. Analyzing two novels--- Beyond the Blue 2005) by Leslie Gould and Somebodys Daughter 2005) by Marie Myung-Ok Lee---I argue that the narrative logic of the rescue and search representational paradigms limits portrayals of birth parents to projections of adoptive cultures imaginings of transnational adoption and adoptive parents or adoptees subjectivities. Among possible reasons for limited representations of birth parents in rescue and search narratives, I name the rescue narratives desire to affirm adoptive kinship as equal to biological kinship and to mediate the threat posed to the adoptive familys unity by the figure of the birth parent, the psychological need of the adoptee reflected in the search narrative) to construct abandonment as non-voluntary and inevitable, and the dependence of both types of narratives on American cultural ideals of motherhood. I conclude that contemporary representations of transnational adoption in American literature and film simultaneously reaffirm the United States global hegemony and its restricted nationhood by imagining a childs transfer to a privileged site of nurture as a viable and preferred solution to child poverty in the developing countries. While transnational adoption is commonly perceived in American culture as reconciliation of global differences and inequalities, this practice also tends to reproduce global and domestic social and racial hierarchies.