Unit VIII Scholarly Activity
examples, whose careers in colonial India illustrate, but also complicate, Alavi’s argument: Shah Jahan (Begum of Bhopal who was the wife of Alavi’s protagonist Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan and is discussed mostly in terms of the latter) and the gynecologist and Urdu short story writer Rashid Jahan (who forged links between the local Progressive Writers’ Movement and Communist Russia). Shi‘i elites from North India also straddled transimperial networks. For example, the Shi‘i scholar Sayyid Abul Hasan (1844–1895), who founded the key Shi‘i seminaries of Lucknow, divided his time between India and Iraq (for more on Shi‘i scholars and their local and trans-regional networks in colonial India, readers will find useful Justin Jones’s Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community, and Sectarianism [Cambridge & New York, 2012]). The trans-regional profiles of South Asian Shi‘i scholars complicate the picture of Muslim cosmopoli- tanism, for these scholars posited Qom and Karbala as alternatives to Mecca and Istanbul. The inclusion of their voices would have provincialized the Sunni-centred picture presented in Muslim Cosmopolitanism.
Alavi’s monograph has interdisciplinary appeal, and will be useful for scholars and students in multiple fields of study, including global history, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies. The book is accessible and absorbing but also contains numerous errors of trans- lation and transliteration. Alavi’s major contribution to the history of modern Islam is the casting of abundant analytical light on the critical role played by South Asian Muslims in the forging of a trans-regional Muslim consciousness and agency. Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire illustrates the volatile yet vibrant, contingent yet capacious idea of Muslim unity that continues to have incredible global appeal in our own times.
Ali Altaf Mian, Seattle University
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To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption, by Arissa H. Oh. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015. xvi, 299 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper).
‘‘Before South Korea became known for its low-priced cars and television sets, it was known for its orphans,’’ a Washington Post journalist wrote after the 1988 Summer Olympics, which introduced its fast-growing host nation, the Republic of Korea (ROK), to the world. Arissa Oh’s unusually sensitive study examines the little-known story of how Korean adoption, which arose in the tumultuous Korean War, laid the foundations for the con- temporary global adoption industry. What makes this work particularly
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valuable, even for scholarly audiences beyond its subfield, is how deftly the author uses its narrow topic to explore Korean adoption’s wider social, cultural, legal, and political climate in South Korea and the United States. While its treatment is not always consistent or convincing, To Save the Children of Korea compellingly locates and illuminates Korean adoption as a product and producer of US-Korean social relations, public and private familial decision-making, and Cold War geopolitical and neocolonial tensions.
While adoption is an age-old practice, Oh argues, international adop- tion is a recent phenomenon stemming from the postwar refugee crisis of World War II. With the United States’ rise as a leading postwar power, Americans came to adopt tens of thousands of children from Europe, Asia, and across the globe. Surprisingly, until the mid-1990s, South Korea was the leading overseas provider of US adoptees. Few Americans are aware of this fact; but, as Oh notes, this historical erasure precisely fueled Korean adoption’s paradoxical success as a transnational state- and family- building project in the ROK and United States. From the 1950s to the 1980s, ROK and US policymakers, soldiers, parents, social workers, and missionaries idealistically crafted successive waves of diverse, vulnerable Korean children — primarily mixed-race ‘‘GI babies’’ and full-blooded Korean children born to poverty or outside Korea’s strict social norms — as ‘‘orphans’’ in need of humanitarian rescue by nurturing US nuclear families. ‘‘The U.S. government used the idea of [colourblind] love,’’ Oh states, ‘‘to counteract what looked like imperialistic activity in Asia through- out the Cold War’’ (111). A seemingly innocent stream of migration, Korea’s 100,000 orphans proved the powerful moral exception to early Cold War America’s restrictive immigration policies. Yet, Oh shows, this moral ex- ceptionalism came at a cost. Admitted as multicultural US citizens, Korean adoptees endured a complex institutional and social adoption process that ‘‘erased birth mothers’’ (175) and ignored the transpacific history of militarism, social repression, and exploitation that birthed them. Genuinely intended as a humanitarian gesture against Cold War-era forces of war, racism, and imperialism, Korean adoption, Oh concludes, tentatively chal- lenged but ultimately reaffirmed the larger nationalist and racial logics it was meant to transcend.
Why did South Korea, and not Japan, Greece, French Indochina, or other occupied and postcolonial nations, produce global adoption? Though similar tensions existed elsewhere, Oh acknowledges, the US-ROK context was the decisive factor behind the novel practice’s emergence in South Korea. In contrast with other weakened nation-states experiencing similar social issues yet providing comparably forceful policy responses, the ROK state, in its drive for Cold War militarism and modernization, explicitly off- loaded the social problem of its mixed and socially unwanted babies onto foreign agencies and families. In turn, a US context marked by domestic
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white adoptee shortages, patriotic internationalism, and middle-class hu- manitarianism — especially among conservative Christian families targeted by Korean and US agencies — propelled a decades-long demand for Korean babies. Even professional social workers, Korean adoption’s greatest skeptics, offered weak, inconsistent dissent as they increasingly embraced global adop- tion as imperfect social policy.
Providing careful global comparative context for this particular story, as well as engaging a diverse historiography on postwar domesticity, Cold War civil rights, and the social life of empire, Oh excels at weaving together the state and private familial sphere. The result is a close political and sociocultural account of how Korean adoption’s various stakeholders drove the practice. Chapters one and two explore how US servicemen in Korea, ROK officials, and Korean and US families and social workers responded, on the ground, to the initial waves of ‘‘GI babies’’ born near US military bases, laying the rhetorical and institutional groundwork for Korean adoption’s global takeoff. Chapter three argues for the central role of the Oregon-based Holt Adoption Program, which developed the contro- versial mechanics of international Korean adoption by diffusing a popular ‘‘Christian Americanism’’ among US and ROK politicians and citizens. Chapters four and five examine how Korean adoption expanded to include socially vulnerable, full-blooded Korean babies, revealing the heightening commercial and institutional pressures within a burgeoning industry. Sug- gestively but less coherently than previous sections, chapter six and the conclusion address Korean adoption’s global climax as a pillar of ROK President Park Chung Hee’s 1970s modernization program, as well as its legacies for present-day global adoption.
Most broadly, Oh argues that today’s ‘‘international adoption complex’’ responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of babies worldwide arose in South Korea. To Save the Children of Korea is more effective at explaining Korean adoption’s emergence rather than the undoubtedly complex ways in which its ideas and practices might have spread worldwide into a multi- billion dollar industry. But with its poignant, wide-ranging analysis and research, Oh’s Korea-focused account sheds invaluable light on nagging issues of Global North-South inequality, underdeveloped social institu- tions, and politicized family life in ways that should inform future studies in its field.
Kevin Y. Kim, University of Washington, Bothell
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