Mixed Race Studies

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

University of Washington Press
January 2013
304 pages
63 illustrations, 44 in color, maps
7 x 10 in.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99225-9

Edited by

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Cover art by Mequitta Ahuja

War Baby/Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.

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Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Duke University Press
November 2010
320 pages
15 photographs, 4 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4683-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4695-1

Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Rochester

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 came into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as infants continue to leave Korea for adoption to the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning 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.

Source: Ebony Magazine, 1955

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption
• Part I
  • 1. “Waifs” and “Orphans”: The Origins of Korean Adoption
  • 2. Adoptee Kinship
  • 3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship
  • 4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics
• Part II
  • 5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea
  • 6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland
  • 7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and their Best Interests in a Global Age
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index