traversed national borders and whose birth parents are untraceable, can be potentially ameliorated by the talismans of a
ALH Online Review, Series X 1 John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 246 pp. Reviewed by Pamela Fox, Georgetown University In her 2014 ALH essay-review on central questions animating recent adoption scholarship, Caren Irr concludes that the “institutions shaping American literary culture may be the Department of Social Welfare and adoption agencies as well as the little magazines, literary prizes, and MFA programs” (394) more typically invoked by cultural critics. John McLeod’s entry into this interdisciplinary field of study certainly confirms Irr’s impression. Life Lines amplifies the foundational work of humanities scholars such as Marianne Novy, Mark Jerng, Margaret Homans, and Cynthia Callahan that exposes, with differing emphases, adoption narratives’ centrality to canonical as well as undervalued bodies of US and British literature. His study generously and generatively builds on their conceptual scaffolding to materialize (his preferred term) the suppressed nexus of private adoption transactions, colonial and neocolonial global relations, and familiar narrative structures—all entrenched within biogenetic understandings of individual identity, family, and nation. McLeod’s expertise as a critic/theorist of postcolonial literature, however, expands not only the breadth of texts under discussion but the interpretive practices used to excavate them. Like many of his colleagues, he eschews the fraudulent, if tempting, binary of endorsing or condemning transnational/transracial adoption, accentuating instead the “transfigurative agency” (6) glimpsed in certain modes of adoption narratives while equally cognizant of the very gendered, classed, racialized, and geopolitical injustices that make adoptive family-making possible. But through his dazzling comparative readings of films, memoirs, and novels by British, Irish, and American writers outside as well as inside of the recognized adoption triad (adoptee, birth parents, adoptive parents), McLeod significantly enriches our understanding of key concepts underwriting this field and ultimately reframes its evolving political stakes. The study’s subtitle announces its opening salvo: the word “transcultural” replaces “transnational” in order to unsettle the divide between “marginal” (i.e., diasporic) and “metropolitan” populations often affiliated with nation-states. It is no mere shift in nomenclature, yet a subtle maneuver. McLeod keenly seizes on the former’s agential qualities, suggesting that “transnational” adoption discourse has been complicit in the long-held view that all adoptees embody a pathologized lack of biogenetic origins (often ardently voiced by adoptees themselves)—a “primal wound” that, for those who have traversed national borders and whose birth parents are untraceable, can be potentially ameliorated by the talismans of a racio-cultural heritage—artifacts, foods, holidays of © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
2 ALH Online Review, Series X “native” countries. Conversely, “transculture” signals “an ongoing aggregation of cultural conditions, transactions and negotiations which perpetually designate an adoptee or their family as transcultural.” Thus, they “do not mystically or reliably bring with them the inventories of one culture into another” (8). While recent scholarship similarly critiques the fantasy of authentic bloodlines or birth cultures that can complete an adoptee’s sense of self, Life Lines’ broader critical intervention hinges upon this distinctly “dissident” (9) model encompassing a different kind of triad: adoptive relations, personhood, and writing. McLeod claims no privileged knowledge or standpoint as a transcultural adoptee himself, yet the ethics as well as theoretical bent of his argument appear indelibly informed by his intimacy with this subject (and fragments of his own adoptive history bookend his study). Rather than dismissing adoptees’ frequent desire for consanguineous kinship, his explication of “adoptive being” phenomenology reveals his genuine empathy for the undercurrents of their longing. He develops this central paradigm along two contiguous fronts: 1) interrogating the seemingly inherent “paradoxes” (14) of adoption; and 2) locating the potential for a transformative vision of adoptive selfhood within creative narrative. For decades, adoption’s paradoxical conditions have challenged its commentators and participants, particularly concerning biogenetics’ hegemony in defining identity. On the one hand, institutionalized adoptive practices have reversed themselves over time on this issue, shifting from enforced racial-matching in order to conceal the absence of consanguineous attachment within adoptive families to enforced “color-blindness”— though the latter principally benefited white American women who faced a dearth of “adoptable” children in the post-Roe v. Wade years. Yet as McLeod points out, the “primacy of biogenetic filiation” (15) continues to buttress the entire enterprise, more recently emerging in calls for either varieties of adoptee “culture camps” that promise a fictive substitute for originary racial/ethnic self-knowledge or, more radically, the abolishment of transcultural adoption altogether by young adoptees of color placed in white households. Other enigmas include the irreconcilable outcomes that bring fulfillment to adoptive families through the suffering of others who relinquish their birth children due to oppressive material circumstances and geopolitical histories. Life Lines asks its readers to push beyond this conceptual impasse, charging that our collusion in preserving this conventional framework “works against us thinking more progressively about transcultural adoption’s transfigurative possibilities” (14). Remaining fixated on biological modes of kinship condemns theorizing adoptive relations and subjectivity to a futile cycle of recrimination and despair.
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 In its place, McLeod sketches out a hopeful (if not always entirely cogent) model anchored in ontology and ultimately realized within fresh figurations of adoptive narrative form. Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of “being singular plural,” he proposes that transcultural adoption discourse can be revitalized by turning away from well-worn identity politics—“being adopted”—toward a more expansive state of “adoptive being” (22-23). Notions of biogenetic origins aren’t so much jettisoned as dethroned from their dominance over Western thought, repurposed as a route to emancipatory “being-with” in a nondetermining “wider transpersonal horizon of interaction” (24). Nancy’s theory of singular plurality encompasses all individuals, not simply those who are adopted. But McLeod adapts its recasting of origins to fashion a new reading/aesthetic practice for transcultural adoption texts called “life lines”: “What might happen if we were to think about blood-lines . . . as vital life lines of connectivity to a circulating complex of material histories and cultural traces, and not as the primary substance of inherent cultural identity?” (26). The metaphor extends to creative realms of self-exploration and production—writing that gropes toward narrative forms flexible enough to render the fluid (dis)connections of “past” and “present,” private and public, filial and affiliative, life story and myth, productively. Just as this study opens with a critical enactment of retracing and rethinking central precepts of adoption discourse, its structure at once takes up and shakes up the corpus of literary texts that have preoccupied recent critics and come to embody a quasi-canon. McLeod’s thesis ensures the inclusion of experimental writing that resists formal constraints of genre such as trace memoirs Lucky Girl, by Mei-Ling Hopgood, The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts, by Catherine McKinley, and Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay, as well as Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz—four authors much admired in this scholarly field, though the latter two texts have received less attention than their writers’ more renowned works. These primarily American texts (Kay is Afro-Scottish), accompanied by Barbara Kingsolver’s early and controversial novels The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, are partnered inventively with unorthodox British and Irish narratives (some fictional, some autobiographical) to tease out four interwoven topical strands driving their production: secrets, histories, traces, bearings. McLeod makes a point of including authors who have no personal stake in adoption; that is, he refuses to codify the boundary dividing adoption “insider” from “outsider” because that line inherently authorizes some sort of authenticity or truth. As he notes, writers such as Andrea Levy, Buchi Emecheta, Caryl Phillips, and Sebastian Barry represent the nonadopted, yet all “find in transcultural adoption histories profound possibilities for political and ethical transformation” (31). His study proceeds to demonstrate that their narratives in some cases offer up more nuanced figurings of “adoptive being” than those by adoptees (cf. Phillips’ Crossing the River vs. Hannah Pool’s My Fathers’ Daughter).
4 ALH Online Review, Series X Still, Life Lines’ most significant achievement might be its revelatory, often breathtaking accounts of how all its chosen texts register “bear[ing] one’s being otherwise” (180) within transcultural adoptive relations—even unwittingly or falling short of the mark. McLeod is at his best when he elucidates how some trace narratives threaten to be overwhelmed by grief or mired in “isolating liminality” (144) but also convert the historical and geospatial specifics of private adoption stories into grounds for improvisational personhood—as he puts it, “making something new out of the historical conditions that compelled . . . the production of adoptability” (86). E. M. Braithwaite’s memoir Paid Servant and Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture, for instance, respectively expose the racism of England’s adoption services in the 1960s and the misogyny of Ireland’s nativist postindependence ideology, with contrasting degrees of success in modulating desire for biogenetic connections. And his reexamination of Kingsolver’s twin novels as postanthropocentric is a tour de force performance—not absolving their problematic elision of Native American neocolonial adoption histories but eliciting their transfigurative potential, which he finds “no less fascinating for its flaws” (185). Life Lines makes a bold and welcome contribution to the scholarly conversations concerning transnational/transracial adoption that have already proven so vital to rethinking its myriad harms and protean possibilities.
