Legacies of (un)belonging have historical roots and resonate across quite different contexts of transracial and transnational adoption. In Adoption across Race and Nation activists, adoptees, and scholars across a range of fields—history, childhood studies, cultural anthropology, gender studies, social policy, and more—ask: What are the experiences of dual-heritage adoptees, and how have configurations of kinship, culture, and identity shaped their lives? How have transnationally and transracially adopted children approached their Americanness, their American whiteness, their American Blackness, their Asian Americanness? How do “border crises” turn “adoptable children” into revenue streams for countries, exposing the vulnerability of immigrant families of color? Offering case studies of post–World War II and Cold War adoptions of Black German and Black Korean children, Adoption across Race and Nation probes the intersections of race and nation as well as immigration and citizenship. It thus demonstrates that in the past as well as today, adoption, nation, and race continue to operate as relational categories with immediate effects on normative notions of family and kinship, belonging, the role of the state, and social welfare.

Contributors: Silke Hackenesch, Laura Briggs, Pamela Anne Quiroz, Eleana J. Kim, Kim Park Nelson, Amy E. Traver, Kori A. Graves, Tracey Owens Patton, Rosemarie H. Peña, Peter Selman

Silke Hackenesch is Associate Professor at the Institute of North American History in the Department of History, University of Cologne. She is the author of Chocolate and Blackness: A Cultural History.

Introduction    Histories and Legacies of Adopting Children across Race and Nation

Chapter 1        The Intimate Politics of Race and Globalization

Chapter 2        US Adoption and Fostering of Immigrants’ Children: A Mirror on Whose Rights Matter

Chapter 3        “Natural Born Aliens”: Transnational Adoptees and US Citizenship

Chapter 4        Cosmopolitan Families: Globalizing Americans’ International Adoptions

Chapter 5        Black American Adoption Advocates and the Origins of Intercountry Adoption

Chapter 6        Love across the Color Line? Pearl S. Buck and the Adoption of Afro-German Children after World War II

Chapter 7        I Want to Show You My New Family: Race, Rejection, and Reunion in Postwar Germany

Chapter 8        Black Germans: Coming Home to Self and Community

Appendix        One Million Children Moving: Seventy Years of Transnational Adoption since the End of World War II