Claiming Others

by Jerng, Mark C.

• ISBN13: 9780816669585
• ISBN10: 0816669589
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-19
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

Transracial adoption has recently become a hotly contested subject of contemporary and critical concern, with scholars across the disciplines working to unravel its complex implications. InClaiming Others, Mark C. Jerng traces the practice of adoption to the early nineteenth century, revealing its surprising centrality to American literature, law, and social thought. Jerng considers how adoption makes us rethink the parent-child bond as central to issues of race and nationality, showing the ways adoption also speaks to broader questions about our history and identity. He analyzes adoption through a diverse set of texts, including the 1851 Massachusetts statute that established adoption as we understand it today, early adoption manuals, theNew York Timesblog Relative Choices, and the work of John Tanner, Lydia Maria Child, William Faulkner, Charles Chesnutt, Chang-rae Lee, and David Henry Hwang. Imaginative and social practices of transracial adoption have shaped major controversies, Jerng argues, from Native American removal to slavery to cold war expansionism in the twentieth century and the contemporary global market in children. AsClaiming Othersmakes clear, understanding adoption is crucial not just to understanding the history between races in the United States, but also the meaning of emancipation and the role of family in nationhood.

Author Biography

Mark C. Jerng is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Transracial Adoption and the Reproduction of Personhood	p. vii
On The Borders of Kinship
Competing Logics of Possession: Unredeemed Captives in the 1820s	p. 3
Unmanageable Attachments: Slavery, Abolition, and the Transformation of Kinship	p. 45
The Character of Race: Individuation and the Institutionalization of Adoption	p. 85
Between Rights and Needs
The Right to Belong: Legal Norms, Cultural Origins, and Adoptee Identity	p. 125
Resisting Recognition: Narrating Transracial Adoptees as Subjects	p. 168
Making Family "Look like Real": Transracial Adoption and the Challenge to Family	p. 209
Acknowledgments	p. 245
Notes	p. 249
Index	p. 293
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