Somebody’s Children

Abstract

In July 2005 the cover of People magazine read, ''Angelina Adopts a Baby Girl!''The story was heartwarming.Jolie was adopting an orphan from Ethiopia whose mother had died of aids.Someone identified as ''a source'' by People told readers how to understand the event as a particular form of compassion and generosity.Jolie, said the source, ''has a hunger about the world and helping people.The whole world is important to Angie, but she's very attached to Africa as a continent.Africa is a country [sic] of survivors.She identifies.'' ∞ The child, subsequently named Zahara, was welcomed by the press with photos of her at the mall, with her newfound family, Brad Pitt tentatively figured as the father, and adopted sibling Maddox, from Cambodia.Although transnational adoption was a halfcentury old by 2005, and had involved significant numbers of parents and children since the 1980s, Angelina Jolie and other celebrity adoptions in the decade after 2000 marked for many the moment when it become undeniably mainstream, no longer exotic.However, the sweet and tidy narrative of Jolie saving orphans by adopting them-the early twenty-first century's act of charity par excellence in an era of shrinking government and expanding faith in individual virtue that eschewed a previous generation's confidence in development policy (perhaps especially in a region like Africa, so obscure that it was hard for celebrities or People's editors to remember whether it was a continent or a country)-proved unsustainable.Within months, the celebrity press had