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Reviewed by:
  • Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border ed. by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup
  • Evelyn P. Mayer
Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup (eds), Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 354 pp. Paper. $48.99. ISBN 978-1-55458-984-5.

Parallel Encounters is a fascinating, highly informative, and interdisciplinary read, contributing significantly to the fields of Border, Canadian, Indigenous, as well as transnational American or Hemispheric studies. The Canada-US border serves as the focal point of analysis regarding different cultural phenomena, various media, and multiple genres. Parallel Encounters enables the reader to experience the breadth and depth of ‘culture at the Canada-US border’ through an excellent collection of essays ranging from practical matters to theoretical and conceptual approaches.

The comprehensive Introduction, ‘Culture at the 49th Parallel: Nationalism, Indigeneity, and the Hemispheric’, contextualises the analysis of culture and the Canada-US border. Beginning with Wayde Compton’s visually structured poem ‘Legba, Landed’, it highlights the importance of cultural expressions and visual arts to question border constructions. One of the book’s goals is 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’ (pp. 11–12). The Canadian, comparative, and hemispheric prisms shed new light on the complexity of identities, cultures, and policies at the Canada-US border and in the borderlands.

The book’s front-cover image depicts Indigenous artist Alan Michelson’s installation Third Bank of the River (2009). In Chapter 10, ‘Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada-US Border’, Stirrup describes Michelson’s artwork as ‘emplaced evocation of Haudenosaunee values of reciprocity and responsibility’ (p. 164), echoing ‘the wampum’ (pp. 165–6). In addition, the border artwork, representing ‘two strips of purple separated by white bands of sky’ (p. 165), was installed at the Massena, NY, port of entry (p. 163), thus underlining the indigenous position of sovereignty in a larger settler-invader environment.

Similar to the three white strands in the image, the book contains three parts of equal length, each encompassing different complementary angles regarding the overarching topics of popular culture, indigeneity, and theory. The first part, ‘Popular Culture and/at the Border’, covering fashion TV, documentaries, and the CBC series The Border, finishes with an evocation of the Canadian Métis and then smoothly transitions to the second part, ‘Indigenous Cultures and North American Borders’. Part two, adding Indigenous positions to the imposition of the international boundary, also closes with métissage, though juxtaposed with mestizaje. The last part, ‘Theorizing the Border: Literature, Performance, Translation’, continues the hemispheric and pluralistic approach to border studies by initially discussing Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas. Towards the end of the book, in the vein of border theorisation, the level of abstraction becomes increasingly pronounced and demands a specialised reader.

The focus on indigeneity is one of the clear strengths of Parallel Encounters. Conceptual and theoretical conversations as well as fiction, drama, film, and visual arts, mostly [End Page 147] analysed through Canadian and hemispheric lenses, represent a multi-faceted and well-rounded picture. Content, structure, and layout appear as one. Parallel Encounters is therefore an invaluable resource for anyone interested in culture and/at the Canada-US border in all its complexity and diversity.

Evelyn P. Mayer
University of Applied Sciences Landshut
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