[KS] International adoption and slavery

Tobias Hübinette tobias at orient.su.se
Fri Oct 3 02:17:19 EDT 2003


So what's wrong with comparing international adoption to slavery and 
trafficking? Besides the material benefits both the Africans, the 
Third world children and women undoubtly gain when arriving to the 
West - aren't the actual practices these three groups are subjected 
to the same: a trade in human beings, a form of cultural genocide and 
a forced migration? Why are adoption of Aboriginal or Native American 
children to whites branded as cultural genocide but not the adoption 
of Koreans, and why is the term forced migration exclusively denoting 
refugees and not international adoptees? Why are adopted Koreans 
excluded from overseas Korean statistics and invisibilised as 
perfectly assimilated children to White elite families in Western 
statistics? Why are adopted Koreans barred from the fields of 
diaspora, ethnicity and migration studies? Isn't it about time that 
we try acknowledge the international adoption of 150,000 Koreans as 
by far the biggest child migration in modern history and start 
conceptualising and contextualising this astronomic forced child 
migration into new directions?


-- 


Tobias Hübinette a.k.a. Lee Sam-dol

Ph.D. candidate in Korean Studies
Department of Oriental Languages
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden

Tel: 46-8-16 15 88
Fax: 46-8-15 54 64
E-mail: tobias at orient.su.se

Presentations:
Department of Oriental languages: www.orient.su.se/koreanskapersonal.html
Info Portal Asia: www.sub.su.se:591/sidor/forskning/koreaforsk/tobias/




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