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Outsiders Within | Reviews
Publishers' Weekly review
Reviewed 2006-09-18
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. (Nov.)
Library Journal review
(http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6387715.html)
Reviewed for the November 2006 issue
Imagine, a postmodern book on adoption. This dense assemblage of brief texts addresses the challenges of transracial and transnational adoption. Written by, and largely for, adoptees—editors Trenka and Sun Yung Shin were both born in South Korea and editor Julia Chinyere Oparah is an ethnic studies professor—it replicates the marginalization experienced by transracial adoptees as it invokes various art forms, including poetry and photography. With contributions from over 30 writers, this collection is comprehensive, offering adoption stories by people of both genders and different races and sexual orientations. Each of the six sections concentrates effectively on a different set of issues facing transracial adoptees, from "Where Are You Really From?" to "Journeys Home?" Like Trenka's previous The Language of Blood: A Memoir and Cultures of Transnational Adoption, edited by Toby Alice Volkman, this book provides profound insight into what it's like to be adopted from another race or into another nation. Recommended for university collections and large public libraries.
Minnesota Literature Review
Reviewed for the December 2006 issue
This is a book that will make everyone who has ever thought of transnational, transracial or any kind of adoption feel deeply uncomfortable. But as Beth Hall, an adoptive parent herself, comments: "All the more reason to read it." Although not all the writers who contributed to this project are from Minnesota, the issues raised in this book have special relevance for our state, which is a leader in transnational adoption, especially Korean adoption. This book opened my eyes to the tragic flaws in the adoption system/industry, especially in that Western-style adoption sidesteps and erases non-Western extended kin networks and perhaps cynically "markets" foreign children as exotic commodities, but it still did not convince me that transracial adoption is inherently wrong or undesirable, or that we can or ought to make windows into the souls of adoptive parents, seeking a purity of intention that we would probably never apply to birth parents. David Mura writes, "Both moving and thought-provoking, its implications reach far beyond its immediate topic into broader questions about all our identities in this multiracial and multicultural America."
SEVEN OAKS MAGAZINE REVIEW
February 18, 2007 issue
In these times – when sound bytes on adoption currently clogging our airwaves are thoughtlessly pandering to the standpoints of celebrities who have taken a fondness to parenting brown- and yellow-skinned babies from the Third World – Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press) should cause elation among audiences critical of this fashionable spectacle. The collection is a valuable resource for those who believe that transracial, often international, adoption cannot be a curative measure–in the slightest–for the inequalities which stain the human experience... [click here for full review]
Vol. 23, No. 4, 2007
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