Diasporas in Kim's Adopted Territory

Eleana Kim’s Adopted Territory (2010) engages some very important questions regarding home, identity, mobility, and kinship through the lens of Transnational Korean adoptions. Save some of the ethnographical terms such as “contigent essentialism,” Kim’s text was accessible and enlightening. I found her approach to the ideas of mobility more convincing then Brennan’s, perhaps because she does use a self-reflexive approach (which I seem to be stuck on analyzing ever since I read Ulysse). For instance, she admits that she had more mobility and flexibility to travel for long periods of time than the other adoptees, yet she was constrained and excluded from “adoptee-only” spaces (15). Overall, most provocative to me in Kim’s research was the way she used the Korean adoptee’s sense of displacement as a way to redefine ideas of personhood and home.

Kim explains, “Adoptees are transnational migrants yet they confound conventional categories such as refuge, immigrant, or exile by sharing similarities with each of these types but not entirely conforming to any one of them. They are eminently and incompletely transnational—their lives straddle two nations, two families, and two histories…” (98). I think it is interesting to note that the adoptees use the term diaspora infrequently because of the significance of Korea as too unstable to provide a true notion on home. While I am somewhat familiar with Gilroy’s idea of the diaspora in The Black Atlantic, I appreciated the manner by which Kim reworked a definition of diaspora that would help illuminate the idea of belonging for Korean adoptees. She reroutes diaspora through kinship, an adoptive kinship, where it is not necessarily the “home” (Korea) that the adoptees all share, but rather this twoness, this doubleness of belonging and not belonging and the instability of both categories. Kim engages what Sara Ahmed investigates in Uprootings/Regroundings by rethinking the “assumption that ‘home’, in migration, is simply something we ‘leave behind’” (Ahmed 8).

Kim argues that a sense of belonging for the adoptees occurs in the space of the counterpublic. Like Massey, Kim understands the Korean adoptee time-space compression, through the developments of new technology and more affordable plane tickets to South Korea, has allowed the adoptees to “imagine themselves as connected to each other and exist in the same time-space as others who are having similar and simultaneous experiences” (Kim 105). In a sense, Kim is arguing that the space of the counterpublic serves as a sort of “home” for the adoptees where they can all share their stories of displacement. Through the space of the counterpublic and her idea of adoptive kinship, Kim reworks the definition of personhood.