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612-822-4611
Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption

Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption

Paperback

Series: Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture

Asian American StudiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesTheater History

ISBN10: 0814259383
ISBN13: 9780814259382
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Feb 27 2025
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee's Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees' birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience.

Lee examines twelve works-from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark-including plays, musicals, solo performances, community-based theater, and performance art. Through her analysis, theater and performance become a means for reimagining adoptees' identity, kinship, and sense of belonging. Further, these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history, politics, and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice, pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.

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Theater History