Greater New England as Cultural Borderland: A Critical Appraisal

THE IDEA OF BORDERLAND IS MOST OFTEN ASSOCIATED with the argument that land on either side of a border exists in a liminal condition–i.e., it has many of the traits of both regions and yet is different because of the hybridization resulting from the merging of the two regions within a particular space. Michael Dear identifies borderlands as alternative or third nations, spaces inhabited by people who identify with each other on a number of levels based on a shared history and geography and blurred cultures.¹ Through exchange, it is argued, transnational cultures are created that are characterized by liminality and hybridity. While much of the debate around the existence of a "Greater New England" has centered on historical cross-border flows of goods, people, and capital,² it is culture, I believe, that is most important in the creation of the idea or ideal of an Atlantic borderland.³ Did cultural exchange in the Atlantic borderland produce a common culture and therefore a cultural region that is unique to this part of North America? This research note offers some reflection on this question, with a specific focus on settler societies.

Culture and borderlands

Before addressing such a question, it is necessary to establish a working definition of border culture and to consider the importance of this complex concept in the study of borders and borderlands. One of the more thoughtful discussions on this subject is that offered by Victor Konrad and Heather Nicol, who see border culture "as the way we live in, write about, talk about and construct policies about the border, and the way in which we have constructed landscapes of binational regulation and exchange." This is a rich and innovative synthesis of a broad range of theoretical and historical perspectives on the Canadian-American borderlands that uses culture as the lens to understand "re-bordering" in North America. In particular, Konrad and Nicol emphasize the importance of understanding socially constructed cultural identities within local borderland cultures. Their perspective rests upon a view of culture "as a social framework for enabling and limiting thought and action, and then considering it as an effect or expression of political and economic processes that pattern meaning, social relations, and ways of life, as suggested by Michel Foucault and Don Mitchell."⁴

All borderlands, including those shared between Canada and the United States, are defined by the flows and fusions of cultures facilitated by the transboundary movement of peoples, technologies, symbols, texts, ideas, etc. Together, these flows and networks of material and non-material culture establish reciprocal relations and transactions between individuals, communities, and regions separated by a political boundary. Theorists have identified a number of outcomes of this cultural diffusion, including assimilation, pluralism, and hybridization–the latter often favoured by borderland specialists who focus on syncretist cultural practices that accompany cross-border movements.⁵ "All such movements," Jennifer McGarrigle maintains, "help establish patterns of common cultural beliefs across borders and reciprocal transactions between separate places, whereby cultural ideas found in one influence those in another."⁶ In the context of post-colonial border theory that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s,⁷ Homi Bhabha's discourse of hybridity⁸ and Victor Turner's concept of liminality,⁹ this syncretism, it is argued, is essential in the formation of borderland cultures, borderland cultural landscapes, and associated borderland identities.

While attractive, this view of borderland cultures leaves a number of questions that are not easily answered. Does such a cultural diffusion necessarily produce a common culture and similar values? And, in the case of Canada and the United States, does the asymmetry that characterizes this particular relationship produce a borderland culture that is dominated primarily by the latter, with Quebec being the only notable exception? Or is this particular borderland zone imbued with hybrid cultures, landscapes, and identities that reflect elements of both countries and their respective borderland regions or even specific borderland communities? More generally, does a borderland culture reflect a combination of local and regional identities and national allegiances with traits and traditions that transcend the border?

Borders rarely separate cultures completely...