| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, January 28, 2011 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | External Event, Centre For Ethics Seminar Room, Larkin 200, 15 Devonshire Place |
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 160,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Western Europe and Australia. Since the 1990s, adoptees, as adults, have been returning to Korea in increasing numbers to learn more about their cultural and/or biological “roots.” South Korean state projects in the late 1990s enthusiastically welcomed adoptees back as overseas ethnic “Koreans” at the same moment that returning adoptees and their reunions with their Korean mothers became major media spectacles in which “mother love” expressed the nation’s yearning for its abandoned children. Both sets of discourses framed adoptees as essentially Korean, and as dependent upon a paternal state and a maternal nation to provide the “roots” of their authentic identities. In this paper, I update and complicate this picture by focusing on the historical conjuncture of adoptees’ returns, South Korea’s pro-active globalization drive, its emergent democratic civil society and the rise of post-IMF neoliberal techniques of government. In particular, I ask what adult adoptees can tell us about transforming modes of personhood, nationalism, and citizenship in contemporary South Korea.
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Eleana J. Kim is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester, where she teaches courses on environment and nature, war, migration, and media. She is the author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press 2010), an ethnographic study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of transnational adoption from South Korea to North America, Europe, and Australia. In this book, she examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of collective identity and organizing among adoptees and their advocates, and the implications adoptee returns to Korea have for South Korean conceptions of kinship, modernity, and globalization. Her current project examines the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a cultural, political, and ecological space. Kim received her B.A. in English at Brown University and a Masters and Ph.D. in Anthropology from New York University.
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