Adoption Project

Adoption is a topic that offers a unique window into issues of trauma, identity, belonging, mental health, and creativity with its inherent challenge of norms since it often connects different social backgrounds, if not distant cultures in the case of international adoptions, and offers – albeit in complicated forms – a place in lieu of abandonment. Essentially, adoption is an act of translation. While often romanticized as part of a rescue rhetoric, adoption is also at the center of debates about the legitimacy of uprooting, as well as about the exploitation, marginalization, and crime that it directly and indirectly produced. International adoption is also an entry point into the history of struggling countries and the privileges of the so-called developed economies in a system of blatant socio-economic inequalities of which adopted children are the most symptomatic manifestation. Yet, adoption is also a fruitful realm of creativity for artists precisely because it prompts them to explore the tension between choice, chance, and circumstance in the encounter with the “other;” the conflict between and co-existence of nature and nurture; the impact of trauma (political events, natural disasters, and personal tragedies) in displacing and uniting people; and the fundamental need for telling one’s story, which adoption naturally … fosters.

The Adoption Project explores all these clashing but also co-existing topics from a cultural perspective in the belief that the humanities represent a key field to approach a topic normally relegated to psychology or sociology. The social sciences, as well as medicine, play an important role but it is the cultural production that sheds light on issues that while pertaining to the experience of adoption are ultimately human: the meaning of birth, the power of relations, the quest for the self, the management of rooted pain, the impact of standardized notions, etc. I am interested in focusing on the Italian case as much as the vast context of transnational adoption that reflect global dynamics. So far, the project has entailed teaching, translation, book presentations, conference papers, cultural events, etc. Below is a list of the specific aspects of this ongoing project that will include additional ones over time on a regular basis.

TEACHING

“Narrating Adoption: Choice, Chance and Circumstance” – a class taught for the Honors Program in Fall 2023.

• This course examines adoption’s primary association with various forms of family (fostering, kinship adoption, long-term mentoring) but also broadens the meaning of the term to encompass the adoption of a language for a writer, of a country for an immigrant, and a muse for an artist. It addresses adoption in its different meanings in a variety of geographical areas (Italy, South Korea, the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Peru, Afghanistan, India, Switzerland, Belgium) and historical periods (from the post-WWII period to the contemporary era), through novels (Pinocchio), graphic novels, films (Secrets and Lies), animated films (My Life as a Zucchini), newspaper articles, memoirs (Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?), essays (Jhumpa Lahiri) and art pieces (Vanessa Beecroft).

RESEARCH

Translation

• Dasvidania by Nikolai Prestia (title in English TBC). Venice: Marsilio, 2021. Co-translated with Daniela Chaudhary Fiore. New Brunswick, NJ: OVOI series, Rutgers UP (under contract, slated for publication in March 2026).

Conference paper

• “Translating a Novel about Adoption, Dasvidania, with My Adopted Daughter.” OVOI (Rutger UP) panel. AATI Annual Conference, Catania, Italy. July 2023.
• “Re-reading Race and Class in Italy through Recent Novels about Adoption.” AATI Annual Conference, Catania, Italy. July 2023.

CULTURAL EVENTS

From a Russian Orphanage to a Sicilian Adoptive Family: Dasvidania (2021), a novel by Nikolai Prestia (Zoom, May 2022)

Presentation of Dasvidania by Nikolai Prestia in Italy. (Agrigento. Aug. 2024).

A Girl Returned: Film Screening and Q&A with Director Giuseppe Bonito (Montclair State University, Thur. Oct. 5, 2023)

From left to right: Teresa Fiore (Inserra Chair, Montclair State University); Director Giuseppe Bonito; Interpreter Maria Galetta.

Ciudad de los Niños (Bolivia-Italy): Documentary Screening and Discussion about Foster Care, Education, and Migration (Montclair State University, April 17, 2023)