Publishers' Weekly review
Reviewed 2006-09-18
In 30 personal essays, research-based studies, poems and accompanying
artwork, transracial adoptees "challenge the privileging of rational,
'expert' knowledge that excludes so many adoptee voices." Conceived by
the editors as "corrective action," the collection offers an
eye-opening perspective on both the "the power differences between
white people and people of color, the rich and the poor, the more or
less empowered in adoption circles" and the sense of loss and limbo
that individual adoptees may feel while "living in the borderlands of
racial, national, and cultural identities." This provocative,
disturbing collection reveals the sociological links between
African-American children placed in foster care and El Salvador's "niño
desaparecidos (disappeared children), between Christian missions and
"the adoption industry," between a transracial adoptee born in Vietnam
and raised in Australia and one born in Korea and raised in the U.S.
"We must work," the editors urge, "to create and sustain a world in
which low-income women of color do not have to send away their children
so that the family that remains can survive." Anyone contemplating
transracial adoption will find provocative ideas, even as they may
quarrel with generalizations that don't fit their own lives. (Nov.)
Library Journal review
(http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6387715.html)
Reviewed for the November 2006 issue
Imagine,
a postmodern book on adoption. This dense assemblage of brief texts
addresses the challenges of transracial and transnational adoption.
Written by, and largely for, adoptees—editors Trenka and Sun Yung Shin
were both born in South Korea and editor Julia Chinyere Oparah is an
ethnic studies professor—it replicates the marginalization experienced
by transracial adoptees as it invokes various art forms, including
poetry and photography. With contributions from over 30 writers, this
collection is comprehensive, offering adoption stories by people of
both genders and different races and sexual orientations. Each of the
six sections concentrates effectively on a different set of issues
facing transracial adoptees, from "Where Are You Really From?" to
"Journeys Home?" Like Trenka's previous The Language of Blood: A Memoir and Cultures of Transnational Adoption,
edited by Toby Alice Volkman, this book provides profound insight into
what it's like to be adopted from another race or into another nation.
Recommended for university collections and large public libraries.
Minnesota Literature Review
Reviewed for the December 2006 issue
This is a book that will make everyone who has ever thought of
transnational, transracial or any kind of adoption feel deeply
uncomfortable. But as Beth Hall, an adoptive parent herself, comments:
"All the more reason to read it." Although not all the writers who
contributed to this project are from Minnesota, the issues raised in
this book have special relevance for our state, which is a leader in
transnational adoption, especially Korean adoption. This book opened my
eyes to the tragic flaws in the adoption system/industry, especially in
that Western-style adoption sidesteps and erases non-Western extended
kin networks and perhaps cynically "markets" foreign children as exotic
commodities, but it still did not convince me that transracial adoption
is inherently wrong or undesirable, or that we can or ought to make
windows into the souls of adoptive parents, seeking a purity of
intention that we would probably never apply to birth parents. David
Mura writes, "Both moving and thought-provoking, its implications reach
far beyond its immediate topic into broader questions about all our
identities in this multiracial and multicultural America."
SEVEN OAKS MAGAZINE REVIEW
February 18, 2007 issue
In
these times – when sound bytes on adoption currently clogging our
airwaves are thoughtlessly pandering to the standpoints of celebrities
who have taken a fondness to parenting brown- and yellow-skinned babies
from the Third World – Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption
(South End Press) should cause elation among audiences critical of this
fashionable spectacle. The collection is a valuable resource for those
who believe that transracial, often international, adoption cannot be a
curative measure–in the slightest–for the inequalities which stain the
human experience... [click here for full review]
Vol. 23, No. 4, 2007
Outsiders Within is not the first book to explore the experience of being adopted across racial lines, but is perhaps the most challenging and ambitious to date. Rather than exploring the experiences of one ethnic or national group, the editors have gathered a collection of essays, poems, and memoirs that put transracial adoption in a multi-national context. The result is a book, in the editors’ words, that is not only about adoption, but also about “loss, love, belonging, alienation, home, and exile.” ....[click here for full review]—Barbara Busharis