CALL FOR PAPERS (may also be downloaded, see the attache file at bottom)
OAK: Journal of Korean Adoption Studies
Deadline for submissions:
15 April 2009
This is a call for papers for the first issue of the newly established OAK: Journal of Korean Adoption Studies. The first issue of the journal is focused on testimony as a particular form of expression that has been prevalent in many of the books, films, and artworks produced by Korean adoptees.
Many adoptee narratives involve an “I” who start off in the adopted home country; the main part of the narrative describes a return to the strange and unfamiliar Korea and, in particular, a search for or a reunion with parts of the birth family; and, finally, after some heart wrenching passages the “I” return to the adopted home country as a wiser and more harmonious person.
Initially, we might recognise in these narrative plots a pattern similar to the eightteenth and nineteenth century European Bildungsroman. The journey functions as the organizer of the main plot structure, while a hermeneutical process of interpretation and gradual understanding of the subject’s past and present organizes an important supplementary plot.
Unlike the Bildungsroman, however, the adoptee narratives often lay claim to a personal truth. They lay claim to a personal experience that is verified in the very act of narrating it. This aspect of adoptee narratives, which involves a blurring of the boundaries between fictive and factive language, has lead to many of the books published by Korean adoptees being categorized somewhat randomly as “memoirs” or “autobiographies” or “novels”.
Instead of these categories it seems more appropriate to conceptualize the mainstream narratives of Korean adoptees as testimonies of adoption. They testify to a personal and shared experience of undergoing adoption while often employing narrative elements found in pre-modernist narrative traditions.
In this sense, adoptee literature is part of the broader stream of testimony literature which, as the literary critic and secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl has noted, is “the most profound change in literature since the breakthrough of modernism” (Horace Engdahl, Witness Literature, 6).
The theme of the first issue of OAK: Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is testimony. We invite you to submit scholarly papers as well as first hand testimonies related to Korean adoption studies. We also welcome papers that are related to Korean adoption studies, but do not particularly deal with testimony.
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OAK: Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is dedicated to all aspects of international adoption from Korea. The peer-reviewed journal welcomes academic essays, testimonies of adoption, art, illustrations and reviews of new publications and media as well as other events related to Korean adoption studies.
The bi-annual journal is published in English and Korean. In certain circumstances we accept submissions in other languages as well. Academic essays are expected to follow the standard North American MLA style.
The OAK: Journal of Korean Adoption Studies is published by the Korean adoptee organization Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L), Seoul, Korea. Editors: Amanda Eunha Lovell, USA & Kim Su Rasmussen, Denmark, Ph.D. in History of Ideas, Seoul National University.
