Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Pg. 99: Barbara Yngvesson's "Belonging in an Adopted World"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption by Barbara Yngvesson.

About the book, from the publisher:
Since the early 1990s, transnational adoptions have increased at an astonishing rate, not only in the United States, but worldwide. In Belonging in an Adopted World, Barbara Yngvesson offers a penetrating exploration of the consequences and implications of this unprecedented movement of children, usually from poor nations to the affluent West. Yngvesson illuminates how the politics of adoption policy has profoundly affected the families, nations, and children involved in this new form of social and economic migration.

Starting from the transformation of the abandoned child into an adoptable resource for nations that give and receive children in adoption, this volume examines the ramifications of such gifts, especially for families created through adoption and later, the adopted adults themselves. Bolstered by an account of the author’s own experience as an adoptive parent, and fully attuned to the contradictions of race that shape our complex forms of family, Belonging in an Adopted World explores the fictions that sustain adoptive kinship, ultimately exposing the vulnerability and contingency behind all human identity.
Read more about Belonging in an Adopted World at the University of Chicago Press website.

Barbara Yngvesson is professor of anthropology at Hampshire College, the author of Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Complaint in a New England Court and Law and Community in Three American Towns (co-authored with Carol Greenhouse and David Engel), and an associate editor at American Anthropologist.

The Page 99 Test: Belonging in an Adopted World.

--Marshal Zeringue