Multiethnic Families as Perfect Matches: A Study of Verbal and Visual Metaphors in Children’s Picture Books on Interracial Adoption

This paper sets out to investigate interracial adoption narratives in children’s picture books and explores how these narratives are constructed through the combined use of verbal and visual metaphors. The study examines a selection of six picture books published in the U.S.A. over the last few years and targeting a readership between the ages of four and eight. Interracial adoption books can help youngsters make sense of their reality and can be relied upon to initiate family conversations about difficult topics such as the lack of genetic bond and resemblance between parents and children. Since metaphors involve talking about one thing in terms of another, they can be strategically used in picture books to make complex concepts accessible to young readers. The study identifies the main metaphorical configurations of interracial adoption discourses in children’s books by means of a hybrid methodological toolkit that integrates the approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Metaphor Analysis and Multimodal Metaphor Studies. Findings suggest that narratives about interracial adoption are positively biased and often contain oversimplifications or inaccurate descriptions of adoptees’ life situations; while these stories aim to offer children reassuring answers about complicated issues such as identity and ethnicity, they frequently fail to provide validation for adoptees’ ambivalent feelings towards their new situations and families.