UC San Diego

Sentimental Journey argues that adoption from China is a critical cultural site in which the confluence of U.S. national ideologies of multiculturalism and the dominance of family in politics and the U.S. global role is made visible through sentimental narratives about home and kinship as they intersect with the U.S. role in the world at the turn of the 21st century. I address a set of interrelated ideologies through which the adoption of these children is popularly understood: U.S. benevolence in constructing the child as a welcome immigrant subject (and China a friend), human rights, multiculturalism, and consumerism. At the core of my treatment of the U.S. imagination of China is the mediation of the U.S. - China geopolitical relationship through the trope of female citizenship. The four chapters of the dissertation, which address novels, memoirs, photography, television, and news media, suggest that these cultural representations provide a window on the changing dimensions of race relations, family formation, and gendered citizenship in the U.S. I examine how these contemporary cultural works represent the Asian adoptee as a highly visible subject upon whom the contradictions of U.S. liberalism, multiculturalism and neo-imperialism play out. Sentimental Journey argues that the construction of the Chinese adoptee as the contemporary liberal subject par excellence comes about through the privileging of female citizenship in contemporary sentimental politics and proposes that female citizenship is at the core of understanding adoption as a mediation of contemporary U.S.- China geopolitics with origins in the Cold War. While the representational figure of the adoptee herself represents the promise of the assimilated Asian female immigrant figure, I examine how adoption is a locus around which female citizenship is held up as ideal citizenship. I also address how white womanhood gains a moral valence through motherhood in the construction of the adoptive family