Arkivbegjær, byråmakt og omsorgslogikk i Norsk kjærleik og Min Kim

Resumé

The article examines how an assimilative logic of care, grounded in the Scandinavian welfare state’s self-conception, is articulated and problematized in Brynjulf Jung Tjønn’s poetry collection Norsk kjærleik (2024) and Eva Tind’s novel Min Kim (2024). It shows how the transnational adoptee emerges as a desired but conditionally included migrant figure within racialized and affective regimes of belonging. Through comparative close readings, the article analyses how documental and epistolary formal strategies render care visible as an institutionally regulated practice that produces kinship, subjectivity, and national affiliation. Tjønn’s Norsk kjærleik makes bureaucratic power and strategic ignorance legible by appropriating adoption documents and commercial terminology, showing how care can include through exclusion by presupposing a “clean break” from the first family. Tind’s Min Kim establishes a dialogic epistemic space in which adoptees develop a relational community that challenges the normative logic of care. The novel simultaneously stages an archival desire prompted by the protagonist’s biographical discontinuity and demonstrates how institutional knowledge control restricts access to personal history. Drawing on Richard Walsh’s concept of the literary work’s “argument”, the article shows how the works’ thematization of care emerges as a product of their formal strategies and thereby establishes a distinct literary mode of cognition. The comparative approach situates the texts within a broader trend in Scandinavian postmigrant and diasporic writing, advancing a mode of reading that emphasizes the interplay between form and content rather than reducing the works to documentary testimony. While the lyrical speaker in Norsk kjærleik explores the adoptee’s position within the receiving country’s regime of care, Min Kim articulates alternative, transnational, and collective forms of care and knowledge that reconfigure the normative framework governing adoption.