Transnational Adoption Memoirs: Narrative Kinning and the Birth of a Genre

This book connects the memoir boom of recent decades with the growing public debate about transnational adoption. Through the close reading of a range of American and Swedish memoirs by transnationally adopted persons, the study considers the function of these narratives in the current climate--both as outlets for personal experiences and as important documents in the form of counternarratives in the public arena. The memoirs show how the intimate sphere of home and family is entangled with large-scale issues pertaining to national identity and ideology while voicing the largely neglected perspectives of the children and mothers involved in transnational adoption. This book discusses how the memoirs engage and reshape some of the tropes common to autobiographical writing and literary representations, such as memory, the journey, motherhood, and nostalgia. Reading the memoirs as shaped by, and reshaping, dominant discourses of adoption, the authors apply their concept of "narrative kinning" to the exploration and creation of textual kinship in this particular nexus of autobiographical memory, dominating discourses, and facts and fictions. Because of their investigation of their own fictionality, these texts hold particular relevance to the development of the life-writing genre. In this way, the book aims to situate and to call attention to the agentive practice and reclamation of voice that is the transnational adoption memoir.