Journal ArticleDOI
Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins
TLDR
In the case of transnational or transethnic adoption, parents construct a simulacrum of the birth culture by providing "same-race role models" and incorporating into family life cultural fragments that are supposed to be authentic but that are, inevitably, translated and hybridized.Abstract:
Life stories of adopted people often have complex narrative lines, since to the already insurmountable difficulty of any human effort to know and fix one’s origin is often added the extra difficulty of lack of information about birth parents, date, place, and, as the oxymoronic current language has it, “birth culture” (see e.g. Tompkins 276). Starting in the 1970s, with the emergence of the search and open adoption movements, with increasing opposition to the placement of minority children out of their birth communities, and with newer practices of transnational adoption modeled on these existing practices, U.S. adoption culture has placed a high value on knowledge of personal (familial, genetic) origins and “birth culture.” 1 In most cases access to such knowledge is thwarted, however, whether by law or by circumstance, so adoptive families generate doubles and substitutes. Adoption day is celebrated as well as the often conjectural birthday; narratives of the adoption trip or first encounter are told in place of birth stories; and in the case of transnational or transethnic adoption, parents construct a simulacrum of the “birth culture” by providing “same-race role models” 2 and incorporating into family life cultural fragments (holidays, food, clothing) that are supposed to be authentic but that are, inevitably, translated and hybridized. Transnational adoptive families embark on “roots trips” to the scenes where an origin might be reconstructed: to the city, orphanage, street or police station where the child was found. In the case of U.S. domestic adoptions, adult adoptees embark on searches for birth parents. The roots trip makes origins seem knowable, memorable, documentable, yet again and again in the narratives of such journeys, origins are fictionally constructed in the face of admissions that they cannot otherwise be known. 3 And search narratives, like the epicread more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Trauma and Origins: Post-Holocaust Genealogists and the Work of Memory
TL;DR: The authors argue that those who engage in post-Holocaust genealogy are searching for coherent narratives that place their own origin in the context of the families into which they were born, and they are using them as raw material in the production of new stories about the past and, by implication, the present.
Journal ArticleDOI
Wounds Not Easily Healed: Exploring Trauma in Communication Studies
TL;DR: The study of trauma, a pervasive subtext throughout the field of communication, runs like an invisible thread that links the research of scholars who study a diverse range of discursive activities as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Parents at their best: The ethopolitics of family bonding in France:
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of parentality has become a key notion in the field of social work since the mid-1990s, and it has also transformed the way people consider their own family attachments, and adjust individually to new ethical definitions of selves.
References
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Book
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
TL;DR: In Unclaimed Experience as discussed by the authors, Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century, both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it, we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference.
Book
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History
Shoshana Felman,Dori Laub +1 more
TL;DR: Felman and Laub as discussed by the authors define the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event.
Book
Trauma : explorations in memory
TL;DR: In this article, a combination of essays and interviews is intended to be of interest to analysts and critics concerned with the notion of trauma and the problem of interpretation and, more generally, to those interested in current discussions of subjects such as child abuse, AIDS and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust.
Book
Trauma: A Genealogy
TL;DR: Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other as discussed by the authors.