Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border ed. by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup (review)

Years ago the US writer Wallace Stegner, recalling the period of his childhood when his family lived along the Canada-US border when they tried homesteading in Saskatchewan, wrote in his landmark Wolf Willow (1962) that “the 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two.”⁹ Some of the same sentiment informs Parallel Encounters, a gathering of eighteen essays by various hands that began at the Culture and the Canada-US Border conference at the University of Kent in 2009. Its contributors take up a range of contemporary cultural products and issues at the Canada-US border, examining them through various theoretical positions. As the editors explain in their introduction, the essays here “seek to redress the balance of the US-centred narratives that continue to dominate the New American Studies by focusing attention on border-specific and comparative issues through largely Canadian cultural lenses.”

The first section, “Popular Culture and/at the Border,” includes three essays that treat television programs – the short-lived CBC series The Border (2008–10) is the focus of two – while others treat Fashion Television, Michael Moore’s Sicko, and Canadian student assumptions on race in each country. All of these essays are well taken, and they proceed from the Canadian awareness of, often fixation on, the border as a cultural divide that is not really shared in the United States. The second section of Parallel Encounters, which treats Indigenous cultures and North American borders, is its best part. As with most discussions of this subject, the work of Thomas King looms large. Co-editor Stirrup’s essay on two artists’ works that treat borderlands – the one Mohawk, the other not – is of particular note. Considering two pieces by Alex McKay, Stirrup argues that they “together simultaneously address and embody the silencing of Native voices and the smothering of Native sovereignty through several levels of political, economic, and cultural co-option.” A third section of essays attempts to theorize the border’s presence through the treatment of a range of literary subjects. Of particular interest here are the essay by Jade Ferguson, who examines Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker in relation to “Canada’s investment in slavery” during the early nineteenth century, and Susan Billingham’s “Detained at Customs,” which treats Jane Rule – as an immigrant to Canada from the United States – through her critique of her homeland and examines “her involvement in the Little Sister’s constitutional challenge to Canada Customs’ seizure of books and magazines imported across the Canada-US border in the 1980s and 1990s.” Each of these essays offers necessary, comprehensive, and long-overdue analysis.

Parallel Encounters demonstrates that most often among cultural figures the border crossers – people like Stegner, Rule, King, and, for so long, Robert Kroetsch – are those who prove to be the most influential in such discussions as these. Stegner’s border-crossing book Wolf Willow has been celebrated in Canada but is scarce seen to exist in the United States. Rule has been a seldom-remarked presence in Canadian literature. King, also celebrated in Canada, has not been much seen as the border crosser he is. Altogether, Parallel Encounters is an apt scholarly meditation on the border it straddles, a book offering a multitude of ways of understanding the border that divides us yet.