Adoption across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies ed. by Silke Hackenesch (review)

Adoption was never solely about the creation of families. Adoption Across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies, edited by Silke Hackenesch, situates contemporary practices of child separation and adoption within a global historical trajectory that traces the connections between US domestic policies, humanitarian discourse, and international conflicts. Bringing together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and humanities scholars trained in gender and ethnic studies, this edited volume demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of Adoption Studies. Adoption Across Race and Nation decenters transnational adoptions as a South Korean phenomenon by bringing together a range of case studies that attend to issues of immigration, citizenship, and the links between contemporary practices of child-saving and -removal, raising questions about mid-twentieth-century adoptions of mixed-race children from postwar Germany and South Korea (henceforth Korea). Hackenesch astutely crafts a volume that addresses questions of the racialized and gendered intimacies that inform adoption practices.

Hackenesch opens the volume with an invitation to consider the interconnections between early transnational adoption practices and contemporary examples to understand how systems of family (un)making are rooted in broader discourses of race, nation, and citizenship and reflect a changing Cold War and neoliberal politics. She raises questions concerning the ethics and efficacy of proxy adoption in postwar Germany and Korea, and the professionalization of social work during this era, as an opportunity to locate the politics surrounding adoptions at the turn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, Hackenesch incorporates the need to listen to and consider adoptee voices as a lens to gain a more comprehensive picture of the ramifications of these kinship practices.

The first four chapters of the volume recast adoptees as immigrants. Laura Briggs links the underlying structures of adoption and fostering practices to humanitarianism of the interwar period with anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. By calling attention to the reverberations of both slavery and the US government's Native American policies (e.g., federal Indian boarding schools, Indian Adoption project) combined with global desires to protect European children during the rise of fascism, Briggs makes clear how the separation of children at the US-Mexico border by the US government, which gained notoriety under the Trump Administration, reveals the uneven application of humanitarian discourse and compassion. She also shines a light on the role of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption and its role in adoptions from both Uganda and Guatemala. These examples underpin a compelling chapter that demonstrates adoption as an analytic to address US neocolonialism, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. Pamela Anne Quiroz's chapter complements Briggs's by delving into adoptions from Latin America. Quiroz reflects the uneasiness produced by the juxtaposition of US adoptions of Latino children against the virulent anti-immigrant, anti-Latino discourse in recent decades. She calls attention to the tiered and racialized adoption-market pricing schemes and the role of parent preference in her analysis of adoption online forums. Quiroz articulates the power dynamics at play as parents make their selections and generate narratives supporting their choices in the adoption marketplace. The third chapter by Eleana J. Kim and Kim Park Nelson returns readers to a broader discussion of the intersections between adoption and immigration policies that attend to adoptees' peculiar positioning as "natural born aliens" whose entry to the US exists outside of exclusionary immigration law. At the same time, Kim and Park Nelson reveal how adoptees were left vulnerable to deportation, given the ways post-adoption services and adoptive parents or guardians failed to ensure transnational adoptees' naturalization. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of adoptee-led activism and campaigns concerning citizenship rights. If one recognizes adoptees as immigrants, then one can see how, in her exploration of adoptions from China, Amy E. Traver moves the conversation further when she considers transnational adoption as linked to desire for cosmopolitanism. In her chapter, Traver's interviews with adoptive parents reveal...