Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption: Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
Autor Ji-Eun Leeen Limba Engleză Paperback – 27 feb 2025
Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee’s Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees’ birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience. Lee examines twelve works—from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark—including plays, musicals, solo performances, community-based theater, and performance art. Through her analysis, theater and performance becomes a means for reimagining adoptees’ identity, kinship, and sense of belonging. Further, these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history, politics, and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice, pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.
Preț: 288.39 lei
Nou
Puncte Express: 433
Preț estimativ în valută:
55.21€ • 57.39$ • 45.77£
55.21€ • 57.39$ • 45.77£
Carte nepublicată încă
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259382
ISBN-10: 0814259383
Pagini: 264
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
ISBN-10: 0814259383
Pagini: 264
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
Recenzii
“Contemporary visual performance cultures have long been full of depictions of adoptees and adoption, but very little attention has been paid to understanding these depictions and their cultural meanings. In documenting theatrical productions in which adoptees themselves are creators, even as these voices continue to be stifled and/or appropriated in television and film, Lee fills that gap, providing a nuanced analysis and rich interpretations of adoptee-centered works in South Korea, the United States, and Europe.” —Kim Park Nelson, author of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
“Lee’s engagement with adoptee-produced performance, as well as her focus on Korean-generated content, significantly broadens the field of critical adoption studies, shifting conversations around representations of adoptee experience away from discussions of memoir, essays, other forms of literature.” —Kimberly D. McKee, author of Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood
“Unsettling Acts beautifully demonstrates and fulfills the need to challenge and add nuance to discourses surrounding adoptees’ experiences and to center the work of adoptee artists and activists who call for accountability and justice. The transnational focus on the interplay between art and politics within theater and performance studies is welcome.” —Elizabeth W. Son, author of Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress
Notă biografică
Jieun Lee is Assistant Professor in Theater Studies at Emory University.
Extras
Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption highlights the staging of Korean transnational adoptees’ birth search and reunion as a generative catalyst to open critical dialogues about the predicament and possibility associated with the process of the search and reunion. While examining the selected works, I argue that performing transnational adoption is an act of unsettling dominant discourses about Korean transnational adoption and adoptees. To be specific, birth search and reunion onstage unsettles postwar humanitarian, colorblind multicultural, and ethnonationalist adoption scripts that have pathologized adoptees in both adoptive and birth cultures. These predetermined scripts have not only restricted the scope of stories of transnational adoption from Korea but also reduced the subjectivity of worldwide Korean adoptees. Each of the theater and performance works analyzed in this book contests the historical and ongoing essentialist scripts imposed upon Korean adoptees, thus contributing to a greater understanding of the lives of transnational subjects—adoptees. In this creative realm where the possibilities of expression are boundless, the selected theater and performance works defy the compulsory demarcations of transnational adoptees and delineate a performative potential for the exploration of Korean transnational adoption in all its intricacy. Hence, this book presents the theater and performance of birth search and reunion as a transformative location where myths about Korean transnational adoption are disrupted and the ongoing process of making and remaking adoptees’ kinship, identity, and belonging in the twenty-first century can be reimagined.
As a close reading of Korean adoptee representations in theater and performance, this book poses this main question: by whom, how, and why is Korean transnational adoption performed onstage? To answer this question, I survey twelve contemporary theater and performance works mostly from the 2010s depicting Korean transnational adoptees’ birth searches and reunions. In these works, the performance of birth search and reunion has brought to light the complexities of Korean transnational adoption’s history and practices. In terms of geographical origin and genre, the works are fairly diverse: they come from Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark, and include plays, a musical, autobiographical solo performances, community and immersive theater, and performance art. Of particular significance is the conversation this book enters into with artists of works produced in the 2010s, a decade when Korean adoptee artists continued their production and dissemination of consciousness-raising scholarship and activism on adoption issues from adoptees’ viewpoints launched in the 1990s. These artists’ explorations question previous and concurrent appropriations of adoptees in representation and assert their agency over how and by whom they are represented. Their adoptee-centered artworks illuminate the path for the next generation of adoptee artists and artists who are cathected to adoption-related topics beyond unquestioned essentialist adoption scripts. In this book, I also consider audiences, including adoptees, adoptive and birth family members, as well as the larger public, who have reacted strongly and in various ways to these performances.
Tracing links between adoption and Western dramatic fiction from premodern to contemporary times in such works as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Edward Albee’s The American Dream, Marianne Novy finds that theater can bring together people “with every relation to adoption, including total ignorance” and allow them to experience various perspectives on adoption. Novy also writes that Western theater presents different representations of adoption and enables public discussions on the subject to take place while adding a new dimension to television and news media depictions of adoption. Whereas adoption in general has notably appeared as a subject matter in theater, Karen Shimakawa notes that “the predicament of Korean American adoptees is a topic not frequently acknowledged or discussed within Asian American theatre/studies (let alone mainstream theatre/culture).” Given this lack of acknowledgment, SooJin Pate’s insistence on the importance of widening the scope of critical adoption studies, specifically through the lens of Korean adoptee artists’ performances focusing on their own Korean transnational adoption experiences, is apt. Peggy Phelan also asserts that “other art forms—song, dance, painting, video, spoken word, performance—should be more fully embraced by critical adoption studies because these forms allow more access points for more people involved in the adoption complex.”
As a close reading of Korean adoptee representations in theater and performance, this book poses this main question: by whom, how, and why is Korean transnational adoption performed onstage? To answer this question, I survey twelve contemporary theater and performance works mostly from the 2010s depicting Korean transnational adoptees’ birth searches and reunions. In these works, the performance of birth search and reunion has brought to light the complexities of Korean transnational adoption’s history and practices. In terms of geographical origin and genre, the works are fairly diverse: they come from Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark, and include plays, a musical, autobiographical solo performances, community and immersive theater, and performance art. Of particular significance is the conversation this book enters into with artists of works produced in the 2010s, a decade when Korean adoptee artists continued their production and dissemination of consciousness-raising scholarship and activism on adoption issues from adoptees’ viewpoints launched in the 1990s. These artists’ explorations question previous and concurrent appropriations of adoptees in representation and assert their agency over how and by whom they are represented. Their adoptee-centered artworks illuminate the path for the next generation of adoptee artists and artists who are cathected to adoption-related topics beyond unquestioned essentialist adoption scripts. In this book, I also consider audiences, including adoptees, adoptive and birth family members, as well as the larger public, who have reacted strongly and in various ways to these performances.
Tracing links between adoption and Western dramatic fiction from premodern to contemporary times in such works as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Edward Albee’s The American Dream, Marianne Novy finds that theater can bring together people “with every relation to adoption, including total ignorance” and allow them to experience various perspectives on adoption. Novy also writes that Western theater presents different representations of adoption and enables public discussions on the subject to take place while adding a new dimension to television and news media depictions of adoption. Whereas adoption in general has notably appeared as a subject matter in theater, Karen Shimakawa notes that “the predicament of Korean American adoptees is a topic not frequently acknowledged or discussed within Asian American theatre/studies (let alone mainstream theatre/culture).” Given this lack of acknowledgment, SooJin Pate’s insistence on the importance of widening the scope of critical adoption studies, specifically through the lens of Korean adoptee artists’ performances focusing on their own Korean transnational adoption experiences, is apt. Peggy Phelan also asserts that “other art forms—song, dance, painting, video, spoken word, performance—should be more fully embraced by critical adoption studies because these forms allow more access points for more people involved in the adoption complex.”
Cuprins
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Terminology and Transliteration Introduction Unsettling Transnational Adoption in Contemporary Theater and Performance Chapter 1 Maternal Resurrection: Birth Search and Reunion on Korean Stages Chapter 2 Bodily Testimony: Korean American Women Adoptees’ Autobiographical Solo Performances Chapter 3 Contingent Belonging: Korean Adoptees and Adoption Communities Imagined in US Theater Chapter 4 Decolonial Discomfort: Extraordinary Adoption Stories beyond the Korea–US Cartography Postscript Onstage and Offstage: Imagining Transnational Adoption within and beyond Birth Search and Reunion Bibliography Index
Descriere
Analyzes how contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption intervene in longstanding transnational adoption narratives, reimagining and remaking the adoptee experience.