Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

By Sun Yung Shin and Catherine Ceniza Choy

Book Overview

Confronting trauma behind the transnational adoption system--now back in print

Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully explores this most intimate aspect of globalization through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. Moving beyond personal narrative, transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported--about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, the contributors unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.

Contributors: Heidi Lynn Adelsman; Ellen M. Barry; Laura Briggs, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Catherine Ceniza Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Gregory Paul Choy, U of California, Berkeley; Rachel Quy Collier; J. A. Dare; Kim Diehl; Kimberly R. Fardy; Laura Gannarelli; Shannon Gibney; Mark Hagland; Perlita Harris; Tobias H?binette, Stockholm U; Jae Ran Kim; Anh Đ?o Kolbe; Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine; Beth Kyong Lo; Ron M.; Patrick McDermott, Salem State College, Massachusetts; Tracey Moffatt; Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja); Kim Park Nelson; John Raible; Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern U; Raquel Evita Saraswati; Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth; Soo Na; Shandra Spears; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark; Kekek Jason Todd Stark; Sunny Jo; Sandra White Hawk; Indigo Williams Willing; Bryan Thao Worra; Jeni C. Wright.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1517910536
• ISBN13: 9781517910532
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

This book provides an excellent insight into the special needs of transracially adopted children. The world needs love, and adoption provides that, but the children need understanding about their needs before and after adoption. I found it enlightening.

Groundbreaking

This collection will break your heart and then mend it again. The contributors are brilliant, unflinching, angry, proud, grieving, recording, resisting, transforming, and organizing. There hasn't been a book like this in the history of adoption, let alone transracial adoption, but hopefully there will be many more like it in the future.