Broken Links, Enduring Ties
Family-making in America is in a state of flux—the ways people compose their families is changing, including those who choose to adopt. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a groundbreaking comparative investigation of transnational and interracial adoptions in America. Linda Seligmann uncovers the impact of these adoptions over the last twenty years on the ideologies and cultural assumptions that Americans hold about families and how they are constituted. Seligmann explores whether or not new kinds of families and communities are emerging as a result of these adoptions, providing a compelling narrative on how adoptive families thrive and struggle to create lasting ties.
Seligmann observed and interviewed numerous adoptive parents and children, non-adoptive families, religious figures, teachers and administrators, and adoption brokers. The book uncovers that adoption—once wholly stigmatized—is now often embraced either as a romanticized mission of rescue or, conversely, as simply one among multiple ways to make a family.
"Seligmann offers a thoughtful, meticulously documented work . . . Recommended."—W. Feigelman, CHOICE
"Seligmann's thoughtful comparison of domestic, inter-racial adoptions, and international adoptions in the U.S. is inspired. Broken Links, Enduring Ties is a moving discussion of the struggles and pleasures of individual adoptive parents and children as they work to forge viable lives and identities."—Alma Gottlieb, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Broken Links, Enduring Ties is an excellent account of the uneven terrain of transnational and transracial adoption in the US over the past two decades, tracing the distinct histories, experiences, and challenges of Chinese, Russian, and African American adoption. Seligmann's clear prose and wide-ranging interviews bring to life the many transformations shaping new modes of belonging, and new understandings of family and identity."—Toby Alice Volkman, Director of Policy Initiatives and Secretary, Henry Luce Foundation
"In this terrific book, Linda Seligmann compares the meanings that adoptive parents in the United States attribute to race and nation and considers how children respond. Broken Links, Enduring Ties reveals the shifting cultural patterns and stubborn global forces shaping the quest to know who we are, where we belong, and with whom. Seligmann's perspective on the importance of faith and popular religious belief is an especially original and significant contribution to the growing ethnographic literature on adoption."—Ellen Herman, University of Oregon