International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Native North America

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the USA and Canada

      • Roger L. Nichols

      Pages 3-26

   3. Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s

      • Margaret D. Jacobs

      Pages 27-50

   4. “Disastrous Adoption”? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing

      • Mark Shackleton

      Pages 51-68

   5. Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer

      • Pirjo Ahokas

      Pages 69-97

   6. Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree

      • Bo Pettersson

      Pages 99-118

3. Asia and America

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 119-119

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   2. Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives

      • Lena Ahlin

      Pages 121-142

   3. The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

      • Begoña Simal-González

      Pages 143-171

4. Europe and America

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

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   2. Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s Twin Sisters: A World Apart

      • Alan Shima

      Pages 175-195

   3. Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s)

      • Rosemarie Peña

      Pages 197-220

   4. Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction

      • Christine Vogt-William

      Pages 221-253

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

      • Jane Weiss

      Pages 255-276

   6. Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America, and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena

      • John McLeod

      Pages 277-295

5. Back Matter

   Pages 297-306

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This book is about transnational and transracial adoption in North American culture. It asks: to what extent does the process of international adoption reflect imperious inequalities around the world; or can international adoption and the personal experiences of international adoptees today be seen more positively as what has been called the richness of “adoptive being”? The areas covered include Native North American adoption policies and the responses of Native North American writers themselves to these policies of assimilation. This might be termed “adoption from within.” “Adoption from without” (transnational adoption) is primarily dealt with in articles discussing Chinese and Korean adoptions in the US. The third section concerns such issues as the multiple forms that adoption can take, notions of adoption and identity, adoption and the family, and the problems of adoption. 

• Native North American
• Asian American
• Nation
• Ethnicity
• Migration

• Department of Modern Languages/English, University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

  Mark Shackleton

Mark Shackleton is Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Moving Outward: The Development of Charles Olson’s Use of Myth (1993) and has edited a number of volumes on North American studies including Migration, Preservation and Change (1999), Roots and Renewal (2001), and First and Other Nations (2005).

Policies and ethics