Broken Links, Enduring Ties American Adoption across Race, Class, and Nation [Hardcover]

Family-making in America is in a state of fluxthe ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt.Broken Links, Enduring Tiesis a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties.Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoptiononce wholly stigmatizedis now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family. Seligmann's thoughtful comparison of domestic, inter-racial adoptions, and international adoptions in the U.S. is inspired.Broken Links, Enduring Tiesis a moving discussion of the struggles and pleasures of individual adoptive parents and children as they work to forge viable lives and identities. In this terrific book, Linda Seligmann compares the meanings that adoptive parents in the United States attribute to race and nation and considers how children respond.Broken Links, Enduring Tiesreveals the shifting cultural patterns and stubborn global forces shaping the quest to know who we are, where we belong, and with whom. Seligmann's perspective on the importance of faith and popular religious belief is an especially original and significant contribution to the growing ethnographic literature on adoption. Broken Links, Enduring Tiesis an excellent account of the uneven terrain of transnational and transracial adoption in the US l“!