Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Adoptee as Commodity

At the risk of being in poor taste, I found this comic quite apropos of our conversation yesterday.

http://threewordphrase.com/changed.htm

Professor Cruz suggested that Chun Duc, the adopted child that Jack and Murray encounter at the supermarket, is a product of America's dominance within the system of globalized capitalism in the late 20th century. Chun Duc is encountered in the same fashion as the exotic fruits and brightly colored consumer goods at the store: as an object of consumption. Much like the (probably imported) fruit, Jack is uninterested or at least unaware of Chun Duc's country of origin. Similarly, the labor that produced the fruit is as obscured as the (child) labor that resulted in Chun Duc. In this fashion the DeLillo points towards the American consumer's reliance upon multiple registers of cheap foreign labor.

The comic, in turn, takes the parallel of transnational adoptee with consumer good to its logical conclusion. This is the same logic applies to the cheap plastic goods and cut-rate electronics that flood American markets: why fix the thing when you can just throw it away and get another one?

1 comment:

  1. This comparison of different types of labor (for object/babies) is important - you might also consider affective vs. economic labor...

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