Public lecture by John McLeod: ‘Writing Transcultural Adaption’

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK.  He is the author of “Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), “Beginning Postcolonialism” (MUP, 2nd ed. 2010) and “Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis” (Routledge, 2004).

Abstract: “Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race and nation are a major consequence of conflicts around the globe, yet their histories and representations are rarely considered. While acknowledging the sobering inequalities which engender transcultural adoptions and the lasting upset of sundered relations, John McLeod considers the transfigurative and creative propensity of imagining transcultural adoption in recent literary texts as radically calling into question ideas of biogenetic attachment, racial genealogy, cultural identity and normative family-making. How might the predicament of ‘being adopted’ transculturally enable the transformative agency of ‘adoptive being’ for all?”

See for more information his personal page.