In this Book

summary

The essays collected in offer close analysis of an array of cultural representations of the Canada–US border, in both site-specificity and in the ways in which they reveal and conceal cultural similarities and differences. Contributors focus on a range of regional sites along the border and examine a rich variety of expressive forms, including poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, television, and cinema produced on both sides of the 49th parallel.

The field of border studies has hitherto neglected the Canada–US border as a site of cultural interest, tending to examine only its role in transnational policy, economic cycles, and legal and political frameworks. Border studies has long been rooted in the US–Mexico divide; shifting the locus of that discussion north to the 49th parallel, the contributors ask what added complications a site-specific analysis of culture at the Canada–US border can bring to the conversation. In so doing, this collection responds to the demands of Hemispheric American Studies to broaden considerations of the significance of American culture to the Americas as a whole—bringing Canadian Studies into dialogue with the dominantly US-centric critical theory in questions of citizenship, globalization, Indigenous mobilization, hemispheric exchange, and transnationalism.

1

Introduction: Culture at the 49th Parallel: Nationalism, Indigeneity, and the Hemispheric

Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup

Presents the argument that Opening up the Canada–US border as discursive terrain, to examine its function in and in relation to cultural texts is, a timely and necessary move. Also presents a reading of an article by Grant Stoddard on the “lost Canadians,” and an overview of the chapters within the book.

2

Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings

Jennifer Andrews

Examining Canada’s settler-invader origins through the fur trade and the development of Canada’s association with fur into the twenty-first century, this essay discusses Fashion Television’s coverage and celebration of Canadian fashion designers Dan and Dean Caton (DSquared2) in their refashioning of Canadianness through a border-crossing, queered citizenship.



3

Meanings of Health as Cultural Identity and Ideology Across the Canada–US Border

Jan Clarke

This essay contrasts the Canadian and US health care systems and their representation in Michael Moore’s documentary SiCKO, in which health care difference across the 49th parallel presents a stark juxtaposition of the assumptions that health is a commodity and that health is a human right.



4

Television, Nation, and National Security: The CBC’s The Border

Sarah A. Matheson

This essay analyzes the CBC series The Border and its attempt to project a distinctively Canadian approach to post-9/11 security and border policing concerns. As Matheson argues, however, the series’ adherence to the conventions of “terror television” compromises its ability to distance itself from US-based perspectives and priorities.



5

“Normalizing Relations”: The Canada/Cuban Imaginary on the Fringe of Border Discourse

Joanne C. Elvy and Luis René Fernández Tabío

This essay explores the tension between the claims that the CBC series The Border presents uniquely Canadian responses and solutions to contemporary security crises and the programme’s adoption of an identifiably US perspective on Cuba, failing to present both Cuba on its own terms and Cuba’s actual relationship to Canada.


6

How, Exactly, Does the Beaver Bite Back? The Case of Canadian Students Viewing Paul Haggis’s Crash

Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson

Easton and Hewson analyze their Canadian students’ responses to the projection of US race relations in the Hollywood film Crash. Viewed across the border, Crash both operates as the object of “reversible resistance” to US culture and raises questions about Canada’s own race relations, particularly the position of Indigenous peoples.


7

Discursive Positioning: A Comparative Study of Postcolonialism in Native Studies Across the US–Canada Border

Maggie Ann Bowers

This essay examines the debates about postcolonial theory’s applicability in Native North American Studies. Bowers argues that Canada and the United States’ different relationships to colonialism and postcolonialism inflect Indigenous scholars’ engagement with postcolonial theory, which, in turn, influences the terms through which the Canada-US border is discussed.


8

Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Border in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God

Gillian Roberts

This essay compares King and Taylor’s Indigenous characters who assert Canadian identities strategically in order to combat American aggression. The provisional nature of these identity claims echoes the debates about nation-state citizenship for Indigenous peoples, making the border a site of struggle over the terms of, and claims to, belonging.


9

Waste-full Crossings in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water

Catherine Bates

This essay examines King’s representation of the Canada-US border as a site of waste and discard. Bates argues that the novel urges readers to attend carefully to the border and its latent violence (particularly to Indigenous communities), and to waste, and the ways in which it can be productively reconfigured.



10

Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada–US Border

David Stirrup

This essay analyzes the representation of the border site in visual art, exploring questions of emplacement and belonging in installations by Six Nations Mohawk artist Alan Michelson and Anglo-Canadian artist Alex McKay. Both artists employ the motif of the two-row wampum, invoking treaty discourse and interrogating contemporary citizenship.


11

Cross-Border Identifications and Dislocations: Visual Art and the Construction of Identity in North America

Sarah E.K. Smith

This essay examines state-sponsored attempts to recruit Canadian, US, and Mexican visual art to redraw North America’s cultural borders in a NAFTA context. Smith contrasts government-sanctioned, exhibitions with Anishnabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s installation Awasinake, which, mounted near the US-Mexico border, undermines the NAFTA-inspired exhibitions’ efforts to project a continental parity.


12

Conversations That Never Happened: The Writing and Activism of Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Campbell, and Howard Adams

Zalfa Feghali

This essay produces a comparative Canada-US and Mexico-US border study that discusses possible Indigenous alliances across the continent, examining Métis and Chicano/a resistance to the Canadian and US nation-states. This comparison raises vital questions about race, gender, and Indigenous identities in North America.


13

“Some Borders Are More Easily Crossed Than Others”: Negotiating Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas

Maureen Kincaid Speller

This essay examines the construction of nation-state borders and the spaces and identities they create and police. In Argentinean-Canadian Verdecchia’s play, the consideration of borders extends to an affiliation with the Americas as a whole, and the border becomes a location where hyphenate identities can be built.



14

Discounting Slavery: The Currency Wars, Minstrelsy, and “The White Nigger” in Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker

Jade Ferguson

This essay analyzes T.C. Haliburton’s attempt to convince Nova Scotians of the need for economic reform in the 1830s, through a sketch describing poor white people for sale as slaves, their value depreciating alongside that of paper money. Invoking US debates about race relations, Haliburton presented his arguments about the value of money and whiteness.


15

Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada–US Border

Susan Billingham

This essay examines the border crossings of American-born Canadian author Jane Rule, in her life, in her work, and of her work. That Rule’s lesbian sexuality was targeted by the Canadian state, her work detained by Customs and censored as “obscenity,” undermines notions of Canada more progressive society than the US.



16

Strangers in Strange Lands: Cultural Translation in Gaétan Soucy’s Vaudeville!

Jeffrey Orr

This essay analyzes how Québécois author Soucy challenges US cultural power by representing New York City, from an outsider’s perspective, as unfamiliar. Just as New York is translated into a strange place for the reader, so too the novel’s translation from French into English renders is a border-crossing text.

17

Bodies of Information: Cross-Border Poetics in the Twenty-First Century

Nasser Hussain

This essay discusses the physical and formal border crossings by twenty-first century North American poets, with a particular emphasis on the work of Darren Wershler-Henry, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Robert Fitterman. Hussain examines both cross-border poetic influence and the role of technological developments in his portrait of contemporary poetics.


18

Bordering on Borders: Dream, Memory, and Allegories of Writing

Lynette Hunter

In her analysis of poetic works by Judy Halebsky and Daphne Marlatt, Hunter offers a new theorization of borders by distinguishing between the construction of political borders and “bordering,” an engaged act through which we encounter others. “Bordering” reconfigures relationships between self and other, reading and writing.



Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. 1. Introduction: Culture at the 49th Parallel: Nationalism, Indigeneity, and the Hemispheric
  2. Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup
  3. pp. 1-24
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  1. Popular Culture and/at the Border
  1. 2. Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings
  2. Jennifer Andrews
  3. pp. 27-46
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  1. 3. Meanings of Health as Cultural Identity and Ideology Across the Canada–US Border
  2. Jan Clarke
  3. pp. 47-60
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  1. 4. Television, Nation, and National Security: The CBC’s The Border
  2. Sarah A. Matheson
  3. pp. 61-78
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  1. 5. “Normalizing Relations”: The Canada/Cuban Imaginary on the Fringe of Border Discourse
  2. Joanne C. Elvy and Luis René Fernández Tabío
  3. pp. 79-90
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  1. 6. How, Exactly, Does the Beaver Bite Back? The Case of Canadian Students Viewing Paul Haggis’s Crash
  2. Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson
  3. pp. 91-108
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  1. Indigenous Cultures and North American Borders
  1. 7. Discursive Positioning: A Comparative Study of Postcolonialism in Native Studies Across the US–Canada Border
  2. Maggie Ann Bowers
  3. pp. 111-126
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  1. 8. Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Border in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God
  2. Gillian Roberts
  3. pp. 127-144
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  1. 9. Waste-full Crossings in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water
  2. Catherine Bates
  3. pp. 145-162
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  1. 10. Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada–US Border
  2. David Stirrup
  3. pp. 163-186
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  1. 11. Cross-Border Identifications and Dislocations: Visual Art and the Construction of Identity in North America
  2. Sarah E.K. Smith
  3. pp. 197-206
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  1. 12. Conversations That Never Happened: The Writing and Activism of Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Campbell, and Howard Adams
  2. Zalfa Feghali
  3. pp. 207-222
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  1. Theorizing the Border: Literature, Performance, Translation
  1. 13. “Some Borders Are More Easily Crossed Than Others”: Negotiating Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas
  2. Maureen Kincaid Speller
  3. pp. 225-242
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  1. 14. Discounting Slavery: The Currency Wars, Minstrelsy, and “The White Nigger” in Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker
  2. Jade Ferguson
  3. pp. 243-260
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  1. 15. Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada–US Border
  2. Susan Billingham
  3. pp. 261-278
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  1. 16. Strangers in Strange Lands: Cultural Translation in Gaétan Soucy’s Vaudeville!
  2. Jeffrey Orr
  3. pp. 279-292
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  1. 17. Bodies of Information: Cross-Border Poetics in the Twenty-First Century
  2. Nasser Hussain
  3. pp. 293-310
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  1. 18. Bordering on Borders: Dream, Memory, and Allegories of Writing
  2. Lynette Hunter
  3. pp. 311-334
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  1. Notes on Contributors
  2. pp. 335-338
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 339-345
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  1. Series Page
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