Map-Making and the Adoption Atlas in ‘Killing Karoline’ by Sara-Jayne King

Abstract

The recent proliferation of adoption narratives in mainstream media provides fertile narrative soil for sowing the seeds of adoption activism, awareness, and agency. Spanning the genres of autobiographical films to children's animation, such narratives frame the representation of adoption across ages and cultures. However, adoption studies show that members of the adoption triad (first parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents) often feel silenced and misrepresented despite these narratives, their trauma and search for belonging hidden behind what I term the "cult of gratitude". The memoir Killing Karoline (King, 2017) provides an insight into an adoptee's voicing of this trauma. This paper draws on two types of mapping, namely Hayakawa’s (1991) concept of the semantic map, and Flatley (2008) and Jameson’s (2000) work on cognitive-affective maps. Using these maps as framework, I investigate how the author navigates her adoption through map-making to create a unique adoption atlas. King sketches maps of trauma and unbelonging, while commenting saliently on core issues surrounding interracial adoption, such a racial literacy, forced displacement, and the primal wound. This sees King breaking free from the cult of gratitude, allowing the reader to see, through King’s lived experience, a relief map of interracial adoption and the adoption triad. In the emerging oeuvre of South African adoption narratives, specifically, King’s memoir opens the way for map-making in similar narratives in the creation of adoption atlases
through the representation of lived experience.



Author Information
Hanta Henning, University of the Free State, South Africa

Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2022
Stream: Literature/Literary Studies

This paper is part of the ECAH2022 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Henning H. (2022) Map-Making and the Adoption Atlas in ‘Killing Karoline’ by Sara-Jayne King ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2022: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2022.3
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2022.3


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Posted by James Alexander Gordon