81 books match the query 'Belonging' and 2 start with a

cover of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Adopted Territory

Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Eleana J. Kim

Duke University Press, 2010

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they have come into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as Korean children have continued to leave to be adopted in the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to Korea to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.
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cover of AfroSwedish Places of Belonging

AfroSwedish Places of Belonging

Nana Osei-Kofi

Northwestern University Press, 2024

This is a work of cultural studies rooted in critical feminist thought that grapples with AfroSwedishness in relation to processes and experiences of racialization, imagination of self, and notions of belonging, agency, and kinship. Nana Osei-Kofi focuses on the function of diverse forms of critical cultural expressions, paying particular attention to their liberatory public pedagogical potential. Drawing from biographical narratives, documentary film, digital Black feminism, and queer organizing, Osei-Kofi offers insights into the embodied, affective, and experiential processes through which the formation of an emergent AfroSwedish coalitional identity is made possible. Through self-reflexive, structural, and community-based forms of exploration that resist binary oppositions, AfroSwedish Places of Belonging asks what the nomenclature of AfroSwede, AfroSwedish, and AfroSwedishness brings into being, what it makes possible, and what this means for Swedish society from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. This work brings together two identity categories that have historically been constructed as not only mutually exclusive but oppositional to detail the emergence of AfroSwedishness as a counterhegemonic and coalitional act. AfroSwedishness, Osei-Kofi argues, must be understood as a coalitional identity, one made legible through kinship-based community.
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