Dissertation Information for Eleana J. KimNAME:
DEGREE:
DISCIPLINE:
SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected Title: Remembering loss: The cultural politics of overseas adoption from South Korea Abstract: This dissertation examines contemporary negotiations of kinship and globalization through the lens of transnational adoption from South Korea. Of the more than 200,000 South Korean children who have been adopted into American and European families since 1953, more than half are now adults. The majority was raised in white communities with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but through increased global flows of communication, media and travel, as adults, adoptees have come into increasing contact with each other and with "Korea." More than 75 percent of these children were adopted to the U.S., and the rest to Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. Since the late 1990s, an estimated 2,000 children have been leaving Korea to be adopted overseas annually, while around 3,000 to 5,000 adult adoptees have been making their return trips every year, seeking cultural and biological "roots." Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in the U.S. and in South Korea, my dissertation analyzes adoptee collective social practices and cultural production, showing how global flows and the Internet have made it possible for adoptees to assert a collective cultural identity as "Korean adoptees," thus creating a categorical identity out of a radically liminal subject position that confounds commonplace understandings of family, race, and nation. In a range of sites and through a variety of media, adoptees are engaging in the production of social personhood---what I call "adoptee kinship"---through the remembering of personal and collective histories that are being unearthed and narrated for the first time. The South Korean state has been a vital part of this process and welcomes adoptees as co-ethnics in a newly globalized vision of the nation. Having been transformed from pitiable "orphans" to enviable "cosmopolitan citizens" in one lifetime, adoptees return to Korea as relatively privileged overseas compatriots due to their "Westernization," but they are, at the same time, among the most disadvantaged in terms of cultural competence. The return of adoptees provokes reflection among native Koreans on recent histories of Korea's fitful modernization, and, moreover, is leading to more expansive understandings of cultural identity and national belonging. |
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Students under Eleana J. Kim
ADVISEES:
- None
COMMITTEESHIPS:
- Sarah Y. Park - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009)