Sara K. Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, And Kinship (Book Review‪)‬

Sara K. Dorow, Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 344 pp. The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of transnational adoption around the globe, transferring a growing number of children from the world's poorer countries to its wealthier ones. Americans adopted more than 20,000 foreign children in 2005, and stories in the U.S. media--featuring highly publicized celebrity adoptions, the medical risks of adopting Russian children, the Sinification of white families adopting Chinese baby girls, or the scandals of baby-trafficking in Cambodia--have made this "new" form of family-making ever more visible to the public eye. Transnational adoption, however, is not simply a postmodern phenomenon that reflects our current age of globalization, but, rather, a decades-old practice that traces its origins to the end of WWII, making it a significant part of the modern history of America and international political relations of the post-war period. In spite of this long history, scholars have only recently started to investigate the complex interplay of politics, economics, race, culture, identity, and kinship presented by this modern form of social reproduction.