Graduate Colloquium Series: Seul Lee (ENGL) 1/28/20
“Militarism and Transnational Adoption: The Obscured Violence in Beneficence of Care and Multiculturalism“ Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 4-5 p.m. Location: 311 Glasscock Building Seul Lee PhD candidate, Department of English | 2019-2020 Glasscock Graduate Research Fellow Abstract: This paper intervenes in the issue of adoption, unsettling assumptions about the “beneficence of care,” and articulating the […]
“Militarism and Transnational Adoption: The Obscured Violence in Beneficence of Care and Multiculturalism“
Tuesday, January 28, 2020, 4-5 p.m.
Location: 311 Glasscock Building
Seul Lee
PhD candidate, Department of English | 2019-2020 Glasscock Graduate Research Fellow
Abstract:
This paper intervenes in the issue of adoption, unsettling assumptions about the “beneficence of care,” and articulating the forgotten link between militarism and transnational adoption represented in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) and Deann Borshay Liem’s Geographies of Kinship (2019). The history of American transnational adoption has focused on adoptive parents’ benevolent care for war orphan children from developing countries. Yet there are wider postcolonial political forces that brought transnational adoptees to American families for their care. In Ozeki’s novel, a white family living in Louisiana adopts seven Korean children whose biological parents are “American GIs and Korean prostitutes.” While Ozeki’s depiction of the white family’s care for the adoptees showcases an authentic convivial multicultural family, the relative silence of the Korean adoptees raises a question of their agency living in white community. By contrast, Liem’s film exposes the violence of care as to how the seemingly convivial relations of adoptee-adoption-family in the United States are shaped by violent socio-economic and political forces. Current adoption studies scholars such as Kimberly McKee and Kim Park Nelson argue that giving voices to adoptees and the biological family orientate our attention to the overlooked residues of Korean War and its postcolonial aftermath. Seul argues that transnational adoptees’ identity, assimilation, and family belonging challenge our concept of ethical care which derives from humanitarian impulses, yet Korean international adoption itself is the legacy of western power dynamics.
The Graduate Colloquium offers graduate students an opportunity to discuss a work-in-progress with faculty and graduate students from different disciplines. By long-standing practice, colloquium presenters provide a draft of their current research, which is made available to members of the Glasscock Center listserv. Each colloquium begins with the presenter’s short (10-15 minute) exposition of the project, after which the floor is open for comments and queries. The format is by design informal, conversational, and interdisciplinary.
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