Koreans and Camptowns: Mixed-Race Adoptees and Camptown Connections

Posted in Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2015-11-04 02:36Z by Steven

Koreans and Camptowns: Mixed-Race Adoptees and Camptown Connections

David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, California 94704
2015-09-26, 09:00-17:00 PDT (Local Time)

In cooperation with the Center for Korean Studies, University of California, Berkeley, we were excited to host a one-day conference to learn more about the camptowns that developed alongside American military bases in Korea during and after the Korean War. The conference spotlighted the intersection of American military presence and Korean society, focusing on exploring the lives of people who lived in the camptowns and the historical context surrounding the overseas adoption of thousands of mixed-race children. We will be sharing conference highlights as they become available. Be sure to check back.

For more information, click here.

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Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Posted in Anthropology, Asian Diaspora, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-11-11 18:25Z by Steven

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Duke University Press
November 2010
320 pages
15 photographs, 4 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4683-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4695-1

Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Rochester

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they came into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as infants continue to leave Korea for adoption to the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.


Source: Ebony Magazine, 1955

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption
  • Part I
    • 1. “Waifs” and “Orphans”: The Origins of Korean Adoption
    • 2. Adoptee Kinship
    • 3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship
    • 4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics
  • Part II
    • 5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea
    • 6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland
    • 7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and their Best Interests in a Global Age
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index
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