입양 이야기, 사회적 기억, 치유의 문학교육

Adoption Narrative, Social Memory and Healing Through Literary Education

This paper explores transracial and transnational adoptees’ life stories and testimonial narratives in the predicament of deprived, displaced and ambiguous existence. Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption is permeated with the matrix of adoptees’ primal wounds of the rejected, misrepresented and silenced, in both birth nation and adoptive country. In designing seminars on life-based transracial and transnational adoption narratives to draw a historiography of a socio-cultural adoption power structure, this paper delves into a creative deconstructing of the deeply embedded ideology of a racial and national identity formation. Through a pedagogical process of defamiliarization of the closed system of adoption politics, student-readers are encouraged to critically review the irrationalities and injustice of transracial paradigms based on the ideologies of nations. The adoption narratives reflect memories of uncertainty, anxiety for belonging and the deep-rooted racial and national trauma. A pedagogical exploration pursues a search for human rights, social justice for the repressed and democratic tolerance in the global context. The social reading of adoption discourses leads the reader-citizens to a process of constructing healing or consoling paradigms as a narrative therapy. This paper proposes how to train young people’s minds to foster critical thinking about the ideologies of nations and envisions a socioecological perspective on a global level. The process of critically reviewing a dualistic hierarchy, forced assimilation, and racial reductionism latent in transracial and transnational adoption, ultimately leads to an expanding network of democratic sympathy and social tolerance in a future-oriented harmonious globe.