The University of Pittsburgh's Department of Communication will Carnegie Mellon University's Sarah Hae-In Idzik and her talk “Except for the Oriental slant to his eyes, he was American”: Asian American Adoptees and the Myths of Postracialism" on September 13.
The transnational adoptee, Eleana Kim (2010) has written, is often considered the figure of “postnational cosmopolitanism” (267) par excellence. Products of transnational movement and visible elements of “blended international families,” and yet almost invisibly absorbed into white US life, foreign adoptees have for decades been figures around which the hopes of postracial progressivism have coalesced. Yet just as scholars have critiqued attitudes of postracialism as continuing to perpetuate inequality through the liberal disavowal of racism as a structuring element of US life (see Watts 2021, Squires 2014, Bonilla-Silva 2018[2003], Omi and Winant 2015[1986], Halualani 2011, Eng 2010), so, too, have critical adoption scholars noted the limitations on these optimistic treatments of adoptees and their experiences of race in the US. This paper examines the contradictions of postracial discourse in the case of Asian American adoptees, asking what work the insistence in minimizing adoptees’ racial difference has done since the 1950s, when transnational adoption was institutionalized. Following Pate (2014) and Woo (2019), who note that the political project of racial tolerance in the form of Asian adoption, necessary for the US’ expansionist aims in Asia during the Cold War, was predicated on the absorption and assimilation of Asian adoptees into white families, I explore postracial and assimilationist ideology around adoption as a form of intimization of power, and further, as one significant way in which Asian Americans are racialized through discourse. This talk thus explores interdisciplinary connections between scholarship on postracialism, critical adoption studies, Asian American studies, and critical rhetorics of race.The talk runs from 3:00 to 4:45 pm in 602 Cathedral of Learning.