Kim and Ahmed

            I have always known mobility as a privilege. Ahmed’s Uprootings/Regroundings challenges the notation the romanticized notion of mobility that everyone and I have become accustomed to. Mobility can be forced on someone for a number of reasons that relate to the larger systematic forces. Ahmed, in an echo of Kincaid, Ulysse and Brennan, reinforces the idea that mobility is available to certain ungoverned bodies (with passports), while simultaneously being unavailable to others based on gender, race, class and sexuality. It is also interesting how Ahmed links the policing of bodies to the concept of diaspora that has been created.

            Ahmed’s notions of diaspora gave deeper meaning to Kim’s Adopted Territory. The adoptees have a hard time adjusting to their new home sometimes. Previous studies on their adjustment to their new environment managed to leave out race/ethnicity within the study, thereby eliminating a major portion of the assimilation process. Diaspora further complicates and disrupts the language around the assimilation and inclusion process. It is more than simple the transfer from one location to another; it is the ideologies that are transferred as well. The resettlement in another location is like reshaping to fit a new world. This leads to experiential complications of locations, which compels one to rethink notions of what home means.

One of the adoptees in Kim’s book had a reaction to a child being adopted, although he thought he had no more attachment to his “home” country. Kim shows how the effects of diaspora were at play in the adoptee's life, yet he considered him the nationality of his adopted parents. He had completely let go of Korea as his home, and claimed his parent’s residence as his home. The rethinking of home further reinforces concepts of diaspora themes in Kim’s writing. It makes one think of home in different forms. Because of transnational migration home is not always beginning point, but could be the ending point. This reconfiguration of home is impactful on the globalization process, and the transnational adoption process. It is interesting how notions of home and national identity play significant roles in the development an adoptee’s life. If the adoptee doesn’t have legal paperwork to deny citizenship to their “birth country,” then they are not allowed to enter the US as an adoptee. Their denouncement of their “birth country” serves to protect the adoptive parents further.

The reformation and rethinking of home give renewed lenses on Kim. Not only is she grappling with the larger global themes of people as political economy, she is interlacing concepts around the notion of diaspora. It makes the whole Korean, transnational, adoption process look simultaneously grotesque and necessary. While there are arguments for or against transnational adoption, Kim’s study is ground in notions of home and migration.