Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption

Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race and nation are a central part of colonial, imperial and global conflicts, yet their histories and representations have rarely been considered. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption is the first critical study to explore narratives of transcultural adoption across contemporary British, Irish and American literature: fictions, films and memoirs made by those within the adoption 'triad' or those concerned with the legacies and possibilities of transcultural adoption. While acknowledging both the sobering inequalities which engender transcultural adoptions and the lasting pain of sundered relations, at the same time John McLeod considers the transfigurative and creative propensity of imagining transcultural adoption as radically calling into question assumptions about biogenetic attachment, racial genealogy, cultural identity and normative family-making. How might the predicament of 'being adopted' transculturally enable the transformative agency of 'adoptive being' for all? Exploring works by Andrea Levy, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Sebastian Barry, Caryl Phillips and several others, Life Lines makes a groundbreaking intervention in the fields of transcultural studies, postcolonial thought, and adoption theory and practice.