Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions (review)

Although Thomas King is a major figure in contemporary Native literature, no one has devoted a book-length study to his work until (the late) Arnold Davidson, Priscilla Walton, and Jennifer Andrews published Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions in 2003. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of King’s work, with chapters on comic contexts; comic inversions; genre crossings; comedy, politics, and audio and visual media; humouring race and nationality; the comic dimensions of gender, race, and nation; King’s contestatory narratives; and comic intertextualities. From the preceding list of chapter titles, it is clear that the authors of Border Crossings identify the comic as the heart of King’s “cultural inversions,” that is, those counter narratives that subvert a dominant discursive field. According to Davidson, Walton, and Andrews, the comic enables King to offer “an invitation (rather than a threat) to non-Native readers—to participate in the text, and laugh with its various characters. At the same time, King uses comedy to invert and contest the presumption of White dominance and to offer a different perspective on the world” (30–31). As the authors of Border Crossings note, however, the comic “alterna(rra)tives” of King’s fiction demand much from their readers—a broad knowledge of both First Nations and American Indian history and immersion in Euro-American, Euro-Canadian, and Indigenous traditions—and their efficacy depends upon readers’ recognition of the way they “talk back” to dominant discourses. King’s comic inversions thus represent both possibility and limitation. On the one hand, they produce a rich imaginative space for readers to participate willingly (and even genially) in overturning religious, social, and political discourses that have subjugated and oppressed American Indian and First Nations peoples; on the other hand, they tenuously depend on readers possessing a highly developed historical consciousness. Since an amnesia about Indigenous peoples undergirds the white settler societies of Canada and the United States, one might justifiably wonder about the ultimate success of such inversions as well as their ability to intervene constructively in the urgent problems facing Indigenous communities.

One of King’s most important legacies occurs in the way he re-situates the current critical practice of border studies within the context of the 49^th parallel. North American border studies has been preoccupied with the construction and policing of the southern U.S. border with Mexico, and it has consequently neglected the northern border whose imposition “systematically has erased prior tribal relationships and Native land claims” (12). The authors’ discussion of King’s 1999 novel, Truth and Bright Water, is especially insightful in this regard and makes a major contribution to developing a more multifaceted north-south continuum in border studies’ geopolitical vision. Indeed, whether discussing King’s wildly popular radio show, The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, or his best-selling fiction, Border Crossings brilliantly illuminates how these efforts help to overturn North America’s foundational stories of nation and identity, race, and gender. Border Crossings is a compelling study not only of Thomas King but also of the transnational production of psychological and political borders, the subversive use of irony in Native literatures, and, perhaps most importantly, the healing capacity of laughter.