Claiming others: Imagining transracial adoption in American literature

My dissertation traces a genealogy of transracial adoption stories in American literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. From popular narratives of settlers acculturated into Native American tribes ("unredeemed captives") in the early nineteenth century, to abolitionist narratives portraying the adoption of slaves in the 1850s, to the systematization of adoption practices and anxieties over racial difference in the early twentieth century, to contemporary public debates over how transracial and transnational adoption is changing the face of family, this history reveals the intersections between processes of extending kinship to others and of constructing racial status and belonging. By bringing to bear analysis of shifting sociohistorical paradigms on individual texts, I explore intersections between narratives of transracial adoption and crucial moments in the inclusion and exclusion of racialized minorities in the U.S. across Native American, African American, and Asian American contexts: the construction of Native Americans as "domestic dependents" of the U.S. government in 1831; the emancipation of slaves and the framing of the Thirteenth Amendment; reconstruction and its effects on social belonging; claims for race consciousness in the early twentieth century; and a politics of recognition based on multiculturalism.; Chapter one traces shifts in the idea of adoption back to the context of Native American relations in the early nineteenth century. I analyze the figure of the "unredeemed captive" in historical romances of the 1820s in order to argue how practices of Native American adoption (based on substitution and integration) and emerging constructions of bourgeois domesticity converge in mediating and framing Native American/U.S. government relations. Chapter two re-reads how the family is used as a central metaphor for national and racial interests at the time of the Civil War. By analyzing the function of adoption in their fictions of freedom, I show how Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass pre-figure problems in developing notions of liberation. In chapter three, I analyze the legacy of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, texts that dramatize interracial identification. These stories explore a crisis in the racial identifications of white childhood, revealing the social impact of Reconstruction on the status of domesticity and family. The adopted child of uncertain or unknown race is a seldom-noticed but recurring figure that is found in Fauset's "The Sleeper Wakes," Chesnutt's novel, The Quarry, and Faulkner's Light in August . In chapter four, I intersect these adoption stories with accounts of adoption practices in order to illuminate the relationship between the narrative logics of kinship and racial individuation. Chapter five analyzes what it means to recognize transracial adoptees as subjects by comparing the narrative mechanisms of two anthologies (In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Own Stories and Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees) with that of Chang-rae Lee's novel, A Gesture Life. In my conclusion, I rethink how our notions of adoption maintain certain fictions concerning the relationship between "family" and "race." Gish Jen's The Love Wife, I argue, represents the alternative logics of adoptive family formation, even as it replicates an underlying metaphorics of the claims of the biological family.