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GLOBALIZATION, MIGRATION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: IRELAND IN EUROPE AND THE WORLD

white, Asian, Native American, or Latino)’ whereas ethnicity is ‘the specific ancestral groupings (such as African American, Haitian, German, Irish, Korean, or Chinese) that are used to sort individuals into cultures’ (p. 3). Taken at face value, these appear to be adequate working definitions but they also neglect the ways in which race/ethnicity have been understood by critical scholars of race in terms of embodied and experiential differences, performative and affective registers. These definitions also mutate through the volume, so that race is sometimes categorization imposed by others based on bodily difference and at other times it is continental difference (Asia rather than Korea) and can include cultural practices; they speak of ‘racial exploration’, for example, in Chapter 3. The constant categorization of individual adoptees (and non-adoptees) also becomes somewhat repetitive and is at times a rather heavy-handed form of analysis that reduces rather than enhances our understanding of the dynamic interplay of factors in adoptee experiences. Families and adoptees are constantly fitted into categories of ‘rejecters’/ ‘acknowledgers’ and ‘explorers’/‘non-explorers’ as well as multiple sub-categories that relate to orientations, situations or factors that influence these larger categories. What is lost is the nuance in the individual cases that the authors bring out so vividly in the narratives that are used at the beginning of each chapter. This approach also makes the text difficult to follow in terms of its key analytical points as the sections chop and change rapidly throughout each chapter. Indeed, while the concluding chapter certainly points to some interesting themes around generational cohort, gender and mixed race ancestry, it is notable that these are not adequately developed and there is little or no signposting of these important issues earlier in the volume. As the authors note early on in the introduction, this volume presents data from one of the most comprehensive research projects on international adoption and one of the first that focuses on the experiences of adoptees as both children and adults. In this sense alone, Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race is an important contribution to our understanding of this complex process. Given that it is targeted largely at lay audiences who have specific interest in the practical side of adoption and its outcomes, the volume also has the potential to make important contributions to the lives of future adoptees and their families. At the same time, however, there also appears to be much more that could be done with the material that is presented here, particularly in terms of conceptualizations of race/ethnicity through the lens of a small population whose everyday life is always at the interstices of racial and ethnic representations, embodiments and practices.