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ERIC Number: EJ1312699
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 13
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1521-7779
EISSN: N/A
Memoirs or Myths? Storying Asian American Adoption in Picturebooks
Yi, Joanne
Journal of Children's Literature, v47 n2 p22-34 Fall 2021
More than just the movement across borders, transnationalism represents the entwining of past and present and the once discrete notions of the local, national, and global (Kivisto & Faist, 2010; Schiller, 1997). Transnationalism calls for a reconfiguration of identity and settlement that encompasses the realities of immutable linkages across cultures, histories, and space. This need is keenly evident within the realm of transnational adoption. A major issue to arise out of transnational adoptions concerns the construction and circulation of adoption stories. More often than not, adoption stories have aligned with those described by Sjöblom (2019), in which an adopted child's existence begins and ends with the adoptive family. It is fair to ask whether such stories provide mirrors, or reflections of identities and experiences (Bishop, 1990), for adoptees or whether they privilege the adoptive family's perceptions above the child's lived experiences. This study explores transnational, transracial adoption stories for young children through a critical content analysis of 33 Asian American picturebooks. This analysis asks: How are Asian American adoptees represented? Whose stories are told? And, what are the implications of this storying? Across the adoption-themed picturebooks, similarities abounded. Most prominently, a majority of the texts demonstrated marginalization of Asian voices in their centering of the white adoptive mother as narrator to describe the emotional adoption journey of their children.
Children's Literature Assembly. e-mail: info@childrensliteratureassembly.org; Web site: https://www.childrensliteratureassembly.org/journal.html
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A