Not Ethnic Enough: The Cultural Identity Imperative in International Adoptions from China to Canada

Abstract

Based on a qualitative research of adoptions from China to Canada, this article analyses changing attitudes and approaches to racial and ethnic differences in adoptive kinship in the last few decades. I argue that culture celebration labour over children adopted from China is shaped by the contemporary Canadian culturalist ethos, the Orientalist imagination, and the Asian model minority stereotype. The cultural identity imperative, a core component of multicultural governmentality, perceives culture as an object, demands non-white Canadian subjects with rooted belongings, and operates in ways that sanctions and incorporates, as it depoliticises and subordinates.