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- Abrahamsson, Agneta
(author)
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Uncovering tensions in an intersectoral organization : a mutual exploration among frontline workers
- 2007
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In: Aili, C., Nilsson, L-E., Svensson, L.G., Denicolo, P. (eds), In tension between organization and profession. - Lund : Nordic Academic Press. ; , s. 247-259
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)
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- Ahlin, Lena
(author)
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Affect and nostalgia in contemporary narratives of transnational adoption
- 2018
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper focuses on contemporary Scandinavian narratives of transnational/transcultural adoption from Korea. Recently there has been a surge in primarily autobiographical publications written by adoptees themselves, such as Maja Lee Langvad’s Hun er vred (2014), Sofia French’s På jakt efter Mr. Kim i Seoul (2005), and Astrid Trotzig’s Blod är tjockare än vatten (1996). It has been pointed out that the life writing of adoptees is the most “radical” literature in Sweden today, addressing the global inequalities at the heart of transnational adoption (Svenska Dagbladet, 18 October 2015). While recognizing the progressive impetus of these texts, this paper focuses on their retrospective aspects. The texts of Langvad, French and Trotzig all center on the writer’s return to Korea; a journey that is connected to an idea of the past as holding the key to a significant part of one’s identity. To the adoptee writers, the past is literally ‘a foreign country’ and the story of this past is riddled with gaps and uncertainties reflecting the adoptee’s unknown and often unknowable origins. My analysis suggests that nostalgia in adoption literature is closely related to various figures of maternity, and that the longing for the mother is often translated into a longing for the mother country and its culture. The texts articulate intense emotions, such as melancholia, anger, and a keen sense of loss, and the paper concludes by considering the role of affect in contemporary adoption literature.
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- Ahlin, Lena
(author)
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African-American autobiography : from the slave narratives to the Autobiography of an ex-colored man
- 2001
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man as a response to the call of the nineteenth-century slave narratives, arguing that in Johnson’s text we can discern a changing concept of African American subjectivity. The analysis proposes that this changing concept of self is linked to a changing form for the story of that self.
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- Ahlin, Lena
(author)
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"And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone" : Julie Otsuka and the Japanese-American internment during World War II
- 2013
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In her two novels When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) and The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Julie Otsuka explores the experiences of Japanese immigrants in the US before and during World War II. In this paper, her works are considered as narratives of cultural remembrance employing certain motifs that articulate the experience of ‘relocation,’ or internment, of Japanese Americans during the war. The paper argues that the tropes of disintegration, guilt, imprisonment and dislocation are critical to Otsuka’s representation of the internment. Furthermore, these tropes are most significantly mediated through gender and narrative perspective. The collective point of view, used partly in When the Emperor was Divine and throughout The Buddha in the Attic, resonates with Otsuka’s conception of the Japanese as a “communal people” allowing her to “tell everyone’s story.” This notion forms part of my examination of how the collective voice underscores the themes of collective remembrance and social critique. Finally, the paper considers When the Emperor was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic in relation to Anne Whitehead’s observation (in Memory 2009:14) that “forgetting […] shapes and defines the very contours of what is recalled and preserved; what is transmitted as remembrance from one generation to the next.” Otsuka’s texts are regarded as memory work revolving around the tension between remembrance and forgetting. Silence and forgetting are a significant part of the practices of remembrance of the Japanese-American internment, suggesting the simultaneous resilience and vulnerability of the Japanese Americans.
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- Ahlin, Lena
(author)
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"And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone" : remembrance and forgetting in Julie Otsuka’s novels
- 2014
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), which has reached a large international audience and is widely taught in American universities and colleges, is about a Japanese-American family sent to an internment camp during World War II. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011) also addresses the internment, albeit more briefly. This paper argues that Julie Otsuka’s novels impact the collective remembrance of the internment, as they bring together Otsuka’s own family past and the national past. In her texts, collective remembrance is the outcome of a negotiation between different groups with the purpose of “maintaining social cohesion and identity” (Whitehead 2009: 152), in which relations of power play a significant part. Focus is placed on the interaction between remembrance and forgetting, which figures alternately as “a necessary and adaptive reaction to the alternative of painful or destructive memory [and as] the tacit ally of oppression and silence” (Conway and Singer 2008:279). Otsuka’s texts embody this tension, which is analyzed with emphasis on the racialization of the Japanese Americans. By way of conclusion, the paper queries the possibility of resistance to the internment in relation to the category of race.
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- Ahlin, Lena
(author)
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Between nullification and duplication in Jane Jeong Trenka’s identity narratives
- 2015
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper deals with Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood (2003) and Fugitive Visions (2009): two texts that detail the author’s childhood and adolescence as a Korean adoptee in the USA, and her subsequent repatriation to Korea. The starting point of the analysis is the recognition of “the relationship between writing and rights, and the extent to which … victimized individuals, can best express and protest their situation in literary and life writing representation” (Grice 2009). Tracing the intricate textual web of duplication and repetition that structure Trenka’s life writing, the paper argues that the texts function simultaneously as a “working through” of a family trauma and as a critique of transracial adoption. Furthermore, the joint narratives of gendered violence and marginalization faced by birth mother and daughter are seen as symbolic of the collective story of Korean womanhood.
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