Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction

Abstract

Chapter 10 focuses on a particular form of diasporic identity based on transnational adoptions of subcontinental Indian children by white European and US parents, as represented in two contemporary novels by diasporic women writers, Bharti Kirchner’s Shiva Dancing (1998) and Sharon Maas’s The Speech of Angels (2003). The moments of adoption and transnational movement to the new adoptive home spaces in both novels are examined, where the birth mother, the adoptive child, and the adoptive mother are the key actors in staging a range of feminized diasporic experiences. Navigating the vectors of geographical, kinship, and cultural differences embodied by transracially adopted children thus contributes to constructions of families and homes. Here the adoptee herself adopts the new home space (or tries to), so as to render herself commensurate with her white adoptive mothers’ desires for family. The chapter asks if the implementation of the adoption narrative as a literary device in these diasporic novels alludes to the (im)possibilities of the transracial adoptee being adopted by her new home space. In these negotiations of the home space and Otherness in the adoptive family, it is noted how power structures established in colonial contexts still operate in this particular diasporic experience.