Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This study examines how Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom’s graphic memoir Palimpsest Documents from a Korean Adoption draws the reader’s attention to the complexity of international adoption and its lasting impact on the adoptees. Born in South Korea, Sjoblom was adopted when she was two years old and grew up in Sweden. Documenting and reflecting on her personal journey of struggling with her identity as a child and searching for her birth parents in South Korea as an adult, Sjoblom questions the common image of international adoption as a humanitarian act that welcomes the other across geographical and cultural boundaries. Following the central question––who owns the story of an adoption, her book takes advantage of comics’ formal conventions, such as: panels, gutters, inserts, and dialog bubbles to unfold an engaging narrative simultaneously personal and political. In particular, this paper explores how the interruption of the temporal and spatial arrangements of the panels with maps, excerpts of emails, and archival documents creates meaningful gaps, how it connects the narrator’s ambiguous racial positioning with the complex layers in the “transnational adoption industrial complex” (McKee), and how it visualizes and problematizes the notion of hospitality on both sides of the adoption process.