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Identity and the In-Between Space in Transracial Adoptee Literature: Making Space for the Missing Voice

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2018, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
Within the past few years, adoptees have been challenging the positive adoption narratives about them by implementing corrective action movements through various scholarly, literary, and rhetorical media in order to claim their voices and agency. Exploring such movements, this dissertation focuses on several significant books about transnational adoption. These works are: Perpetual Child: Dismantling the Stereotype; Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption; Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology; Lucky Girl: A Memoir; Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation; and Fugitive Visions: An Adoptee’s Return to Korea. The narratives individually and collectively offer alternative voices in the exploration of identities across borders, cultures, and boundaries in ways that intersect with immigration and ethnic literature. Each book strengthens the intersectionality conversation of transnational adoptees and the importance of understanding their in-between identities as unique. Moreover, each narrative reflects the transnational adoptees’ temporary umbrella of white privilege and their 1.5 generation immigration status that set them apart from same-race and transracial domestically-adopted persons as well as their first-generation cohort and second-generation same-aged peers. Focusing on these dynamics, this dissertation attempts to privilege transnational adoptee books and scholarship that work to shift the conversations about orphan/adoptees to those created by adoptees. It aims to make a space for their missing voices.
Babacar M'Baye (Advisor)
Pam Lieske (Committee Member)
Kevin Floyd (Committee Member)
Carla Goar (Committee Member)
William Kalkhoff (Committee Member)
307 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Owens, W. M. (2018). Identity and the In-Between Space in Transracial Adoptee Literature: Making Space for the Missing Voice [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent152283718139289

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Owens, Wendy. Identity and the In-Between Space in Transracial Adoptee Literature: Making Space for the Missing Voice. 2018. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent152283718139289.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Owens, Wendy. "Identity and the In-Between Space in Transracial Adoptee Literature: Making Space for the Missing Voice." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent152283718139289

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)