Jane Jeong Trenka  (above)    

Books by Sun Yung Shin

Skirt Full of Black / Cooper's Lesson  / Outsiders Within

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Books by Jane Jeong Trenka

The Language of Blood /  Outsiders Within

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Books byJulia Sudbury

Global Lockdown: Race,  Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex  / Other Kinds of Dreams

Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption

Edited By Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sun Yung Shin

Reviews

You must have seen one-they're everywhere. Photo blow-ups of Hollywood star Angelina Jolie and Zahara, the child she adopted from Ethiopia, both beaming. "Saved by a Mother's Love"-it's People's cover story. Zahara, we're told, is thriving. Nothing is said of the grandmother who tried to keep her, broken ties, loss. Adoption is a win-win. Right?

Healthy white infants have become hard to locate and expensive to adopt. So people from around the world turn to interracial and intercountry adoption, often, like Jolie, with the idea that while growing their families, they're saving children from destitution. But as Outsiders Within reveals, while transracial adoption is a practice traditionally considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and even economic toll.

Through compelling essays, fiction, poetry, and art, the contributors to this landmark publication carefully explore this most intimate aspect of globalization. Finally, in the unmediated voices of the adults who have matured within it, we find a rarely-considered view of adoption, an institution that pulls apart old families and identities and grafts new ones.

Moving beyond personal narrative, these 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, they unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, ultimately reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.

—Publisher, South End Press (2006)  

In 30 personal essays, research-based studies, poems and accompanying artwork, transracial adoptees "challenge the privileging of rational, 'expert' knowledge that excludes so many adoptee voices." Conceived by the editors as "corrective action," the collection offers an eye-opening perspective on both the "the power differences between white people and people of color, the rich and the poor, the more or less empowered in adoption circles" and the sense of loss and limbo that individual adoptees may feel while "living in the borderlands of racial, national, and cultural identities."

This provocative, disturbing collection reveals the sociological links between African-American children placed in foster care and El Salvador's "niño desaparecidos (disappeared children), between Christian missions and "the adoption industry," between a transracial adoptee born in Vietnam and raised in Australia and one born in Korea and raised in the U.S. "We must work," the editors urge, "to create and sustain a world in which low-income women of color do not have to send away their children so that the family that remains can survive." Anyone contemplating transracial adoption will find provocative ideas, even as they may quarrel with generalizations that don't fit their own lives.

—Publishers Weekly

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Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was adopted at thirteen months old by a Polish-Irish-German Catholic American family in the Chicago area. Sun Yung is a poet, teacher, and freelance writer.  Her bilingual children’s book, Cooper’s Lesson (published by Children’s Book Press and due out in Spring 2004), is illustrated by Korean American artist Kim Cogan with Korean translations by Min Paek, author of Aekyung’s Dream. She lives with her husband (who is a domestic kept-in-the-family adoptee from Chicago), outdoor-sports journalist Christopher Cross, and their two non-adopted children in Minneapolis. She is finishing her Master’s degree in Education and seeking a publisher for her first manuscript of poetry.

For more on Sun Yung, click here: www.sunyungshin.com

Jane Jeong Trenka was born in Seoul, Korea.  She and her sister were adopted into a white family in rural northern Minnesota in 1972.  She was reunited with her birth family in 1995.  Jane is the author of The Language of Blood:  A Memoir, published by Borealis Books.  She has received numerous awards for her writing, including selection for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

For more on Jane, click here: www.languageofblood.com

 

Julia Sudbury is of Nigerian/English descent and was adopted by a white family at six months old.  She found her birth parents and five additional siblings in her twenties and since then she has committed herself to supporting other adoptees involved in the search process.  Julia is a founding member of the Bay Area Transracial Adoptee Support Group and a member of the British Association of Transracially Adopted People (ATRAP). Julia Sudbury is Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College and the author of Other Kinds of Dreams:  Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Transformation, published by Routledge. For more on Julia, click here: www.mills.edu/ETHS/eths_jsudbury.html

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Outsiders Within: Transracial Adoptees Write on Race and Belonging

 Deadline:  December 31, 2003

a new anthology written and edited solely by transracial adoptees

seeks work about our experiences

Our goals are to:

·        As the number of transracial adoptions increases each year, it is imperative for us to make our voices heard. White adoptive parents have dominated the literature of adoption for over half a century.  We can start to correct this imbalance by working together to make one permanent, forceful, and important book that explodes some of the long-held myths of adoption.

Please send: Your most provocative poetry, memoirs, and stories. 

What is your personal truth?  What do you do to survive?  How are you affected by your race, gender, and culture?  What are your sources of power?  What role does food play in your life?  How do you make sense of your experience?  Where do you go from here?  Would or have you adopted children, and why or why not?  Talk about your sense of home, community, environment, and family.  Write about your relationships, parenting your own children, your interactions with people of all colors.  Reading the theoretical topics below might give you some ideas—write about whatever is important to you!  Send your most honest, uncensored, hard-hitting work.

Theoretical pieces adapted for a lay audience. 

We are particularly interested in topics which include but are not limited to:  international adoptions; adoption of Native and Black people; genocide, including cultural genocide; gift cultures; gender and sexuality; debates over “same race” policies; legal perspectives; adoption and criteria of mental health; spirituality; colonialism, imperialism, and paternalism; adoption as an industry; theorizing of identity (including assimilation, racialization, hybridity and floating identity); fragmentation; globalization and diaspora; gendered racism and racist sexism; stereotypes; alienation; and marginality.

Your most compelling photography and artwork. 

Send work that will look great reproduced in black-and-white print.  Photographs and photographic reproduction of film, sculpture, painting, fashion, etc. welcome.  Please send in .jpg format.

Send all submissions and inquires to:

jane@languageofblood.com

All pieces must include a brief summary of the work and a short bio, including age, gender, nation of origin and/or ethnicity, adopted country, and any other biographical information which is important to understanding your work.  Maximum length 30 pages (no minimum).  Please indicate the name(s) or you would like to use for publication.  Don’t forget to include your contact information! 

Please note that due to space limitations there is no guarantee that submissions will be included in the anthology.  However, you will receive confirmation that your submission was received.  We greatly appreciate all submissions, and will handle them with care and respect.  We look forward to seeing your fantastic work! 

 Deadline:  December 31, 2003

Claim your power and your dignity, and let the revolution begin!

About the Editors