Jane Jeong Trenka

Outsiders Within reveals, while transracial adoption is a practice traditionally considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and even economic toll. Through compelling essays, fiction, poetry, and art, the contributors to this landmark publication carefully explore this most intimate aspect of globalization. Finally, in the unmediated voices of the adults who have matured within it, we find a rarely-considered view of adoption, an institution that pulls apart old families and identities and grafts new ones.

Moving beyond personal narrative, these transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported—about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, they unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, ultimately reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice. Selected Reading Questionnaire.… (meer)

Outsiders Within is a really interesting anthology that covers a lot of issues surrounding transracial and transnational adoption. It is very thorough and covers not only the problems that many adoptees have faced over the years, but why transnational adoption has occurred in such great numbers and asks the important questions such as why have the underlying reasons behind transnational adoption not been addressed?

It was interesting to see one of the side-effects of the women's movement in the 1970s. With fewer young women being coerced into carrying unplanned pregnancies to term and giving the babies up for adoption, upper and middle class white couples experienced a dearth of white babies to adopt, hence they turned to other countries for adoption.… (meer)