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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
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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
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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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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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update 28 November 2011
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