“Contemporary visual performance cultures have long been full of depictions of adoptees and adoption, but very little attention has been paid to understanding these depictions and their cultural meanings. In documenting theatrical productions in which adoptees themselves are creators, even as these voices continue to be stifled and/or appropriated in television and film, Lee fills that gap, providing a nuanced analysis and rich interpretations of adoptee-centered works in South Korea, the United States, and Europe.” —Kim Park Nelson, author of Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
“Unsettling Acts beautifully demonstrates and fulfills the need to challenge and add nuance to discourses surrounding adoptees’ experiences and to center the work of adoptee artists and activists who call for accountability and justice. The transnational focus on the interplay between art and politics within theater and performance studies is welcome.” —Elizabeth W. Son, author of Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress
“Lee’s engagement with adoptee-produced performance, as well as her focus on Korean-generated content, significantly broadens the field of critical adoption studies, shifting conversations around representations of adoptee experience away from discussions of memoir, essays, other forms of literature.” —Kimberly D. McKee, author of Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood
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 becomes 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.
Jieun Lee is Assistant Professor in Theater Studies at Emory University.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Terminology and Transliteration
Introduction Unsettling Transnational Adoption in Contemporary Theater and Performance
Chapter 1 Maternal Resurrection: Birth Search and Reunion on Korean Stages
Chapter 2 Bodily Testimony: Korean American Women Adoptees’ Autobiographical Solo Performances
Chapter 3 Contingent Belonging: Korean Adoptees and Adoption Communities Imagined in US Theater
Chapter 4 Decolonial Discomfort: Extraordinary Adoption Stories beyond the Korea–US Cartography
Postscript Onstage and Offstage: Imagining Transnational Adoption within and beyond Birth Search and Reunion
Bibliography
Index
