"The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human
Possibility" addresses a series of questions about common beliefs
about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that
human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held
by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost.
This book explores representations of adoption--transracial,
transnational, and domestic same-race adoption--that reimagine
human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of
alternatives.
Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making's
special relationship to themes of adoption, an "as if" form of
family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or
"real." Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover
bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words
of novelist Jeanette Winterson, "adopted children are self-invented
because we have to be." In attempting to recover their lost
histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about
themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless
they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging
biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm
societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented
through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature
of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency,
and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which
literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of
creativity, manages this tension.
The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as
"Silas Marner," "What Maisie Knew," and "Beloved"); memoirs by
adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary
films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published
interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way
the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they
meet their original families, must construct their own stories
rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they
return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the
shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch
Disney's iconic "Mulan," with its alluring story of destiny written
on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell
painful secrets held for decades.
This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women's
and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it
will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists
in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in
adoption and in race.
General
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