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From Charlotte to the Outposts of Empire Troping Adoption Beverly Lyon Clark Zoos and endangered-species organizations urge us to adopt an animal. Teachers and school officials urge our children to adopt a tree or perhaps a fire hydrant . State transportation officials urge us to adopt a highway or occasionally, more truthfully, a "visibility spot:' A magazine advertisement urges us to adopt an acre ofrain forest (only $35, plus $2.50 shipping and handling-for the shipping and handling of"a personalized honorary land deed suitable for framing"). In the past six years, in a progressive lab school for the elementary grades, my children and I have been urged to adopt a tree outside a classroom window, to adopt traveling dolls that may never return, to adopt an elderly classroom visitor as a grandmother, to adopt books for the school library, and even to adopt a family by providing them with sweaters and mittens (this last sponsored by our state's Department of Children, Youth, and Families, whose employees should, of all people, know better). All of these endeavors reinforce any tendencies of children who are still thinking concretely to consider adoption only second best, or a simple financial transaction, or merely a temporary convenience -or at the very least as confusing.I All too often publicists trope adoption to evoke fuzzy feelings offamily connection without the serious obligations ofliteral adoption. All too often the culture at large trivializes adoption. Let me give another example and implicate myself in this cultural discourse a bit more. I can easily imagine saying the following with respect to choosing a course text: "I thought I'd adopt this text this year, but that doesn't mean I'm married to it." Note the curious pairing of metaphors-adoption for the temporary arrangement, marriage for the permanent one-when in fact, in our society, marriages dissolve far more frequently than adoptions do. Despite the current realities of adoption, and even when we participate in those realities, we are all spoken by cultural discourses that image adoption as transient and second best. Yet there are moments when that discourse is interrupted. I turn in this essay to two cultural moments that offer more complex and potentially more empowering portraits of adoption. One is a recent moment in literary criticism: criticism has not generally been kind when it turns to a metaphorics of adoption , but recent cultural and postcolonial criticism reveals some signs ofchange. The other moment, focused several decades earlier, is an intriguingly proleptic moment in children's literature. 97 98 Imagining Adoption In its earliest recorded appearances, starting in 1387 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term adoption referred to voluntary entry into a familial relationship. Yet its extension to the notion of adopting, say, a stance or policy is so old, dating to at least 1598, that the metaphor has become almost transparent, almost invisible. The familial connection is almost severed yet not quite. My thinking here parallels that of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue that presumably dead metaphors are in fact systematic-that our values "form a coherent system with the metaphorical concepts we live by."2 Dead metaphors are never altogether dead. It does not take much to revivify the metaphor of adoption, to evoke the root meaning. Literary theorists, especially those working across the social constructions of race, frequently deploy the language of adoption, whether they talk of adopting a stance, a language, a literary form, or a strategy. It is not coincidental that when scholars in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler's collection Cultural Studies adopt the language ofadoption, they generally do so in the context of discussing not parent-child relationships but cross-racial or even crossspecies ones. Sometimes they casually use the term to describe a relationship whose artificiality they want to foreground. Yet sometimes the term refers to a fruitful relationship of choice and commitment. Kobena Mercer distinguishes between "imitative fantasies," such as the short-lived, quasi-parodic White Panther Party of 1969, and "alliances that created new forms of political solidarity": he describes Jean Genet's participation in the work of the Black Panther Party, defending Bobby Seale, in terms of his being "adopted" into the community.3 Helena Michie writes tellingly, in another context, ofthe dangers ofthe metaphor of sisterhood to feminists, how it tempts feminists to subsume otherness;4 what she is groping for but fails to find is a metaphor for the socially constructed family , such a...

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