Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms xiii
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption 1
Part I
1. "Waifs" and "Orphans": The Origins of Korean Adoption 43
2. Adoptee Kinship 83
3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship 101
4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics 133
Part II
5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea 171
6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland 211
7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and Their Best Interests in a Global Age 249
Notes 269
Works Cited 291
Index 311

Promotional Information

An ethnography documenting the experience of South Koreans adopted by American parents

About the Author

Eleana J. Kim is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.

Reviews

"Adopted Territory is the best and most thorough treatment of [this topic] transnational adoption that I have seen. Eleana J. Kim provides sophisticated analyses of Korean overseas adoption to the United States and South Korean history and state politics, all within the contexts of cold war geopolitics and the rise of the American empire, as well as issues of nation, race, citizenship, gender, social class, and culture. The breadth, depth, and scope of Kim's analyses contribute importantly to our understanding of the people and the phenomenon. Her well-contextualized and sensitive discussions of adoptee subjectivities are of particular interest." Elaine H. Kim, University of California, Berkeley "Adopted Territory is amazing: deeply felt, moving, and true. It is an exemplary work of the new 'transnationalism' scholarship, and it moves adoption scholarship beyond some unhelpful ideas that haunt the field. Eleana J. Kim is both detached and engaged, embracing ambiguity and irony, while valuing the multiple kinds of ethnographic subjects she studies and the labor of identity-making by the Korean adoptees. In addition, the history of the emergent networks of Korean adoptees has not been told, and I imagine that its existence will come as a revelation for many." Laura Briggs, co-editor of International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children "This truly remarkable ethnography chronicles the birth and first generation of the global Korean adoptee movement. Adopted Territory brilliantly asserts that the movement is born of a powerful historical conjuncture among the U.S. Millennial culture of multiculturalism, South Korea's aggressive globalization regimes and emergent democratic civil society, and adoptees coming of age. Adopted Territory also offers a sophisticated study of family, kinship, and nation through the challenging lens of adoption, which Eleana J. Kim declares a veritable 'catalyst for social transformation.' A beautifully crafted multisited ethnography, Adopted Territory will no doubt enjoy a vibrant intellectual life."--Nancy Abelmann, author of The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation