Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border(Cultural Studies)

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.

Table of Contents:
Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-Border, edited by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Culture at the 49th Parallel: Nationalism, Indigeneity, and the Hemispheric Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup Popular Culture and/at the Border 2. Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television's Border Crossings Jennifer Andrews 3. Meanings of Health as Cultural Identity and Ideology Across the Canada-US Border Jan Clarke 4. Television, Nation, and National Security: CBC's The Border Sarah A. Matheson 5. ""Normalizing Relations"": The Canada/Cuba Imaginary on the Fringe of Border Discourse Joanne C. Elvy and Luis René Fernández Tabío 6. How, Exactly, Does the Beaver Bite Back? The Case of Canadian Students Viewing Paul Haggis's Crash Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson Indigenous Cultures and North American Borders 7. Discursive Positioning: A Comparative Study of Postcolonialism in Native Studies Across the Canada-US Border Maggie Ann Bowers 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 9. Waste-full Crossings in Thomas King's Truth & Bright Water Catherine Bates 10. Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada-US Border David Stirrup 11. Cross-Border Identifications and Dislocations: Visual Art and the Construction of Identity in North America Sarah E.K. Smith 12. Conversations That Never Happened: The Writing and Activism of Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Campbell, and Howard Adams Zalfa Feghali Theorizing the Border: Literature, Performance, Translation 13. ""Some Borders Are More Easily Crossed Than Others"": Negotiating Guillermo Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas Maureen Kincaid Speller 14. Discounting Slavery: The Currency Wars, Minstrelsy, and ""The White Nigger"" in T.C. Haliburton's The Clockmaker Jade Ferguson 15. Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada-US Border Susan Billingham 16. Strangers in Strange Lands: Cultural Translation in Gaétan Soucy's Vaudeville! Jeffrey Orr 17. Bodies of Information: Cross-Border Poetics in the Twenty-First Century Nasser Hussain 18. Bordering on Borders: Dream, Memory, and Allegories of Writing Lynette Hunter Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
Gillian Roberts is a lecturer in North American Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is co-investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network. She recently completed a monograph on cultural representations of the Canada-US border. David Stirrup is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent. He is the principal investigator of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network.

Review :
"'Parallel Encounters' is an exciting addition to recent critical work that will not stop at the border! The sustained attention to the Canada-US border in this great collection contributes to crucial disciplinary shifts that now revise national fields in North American, hemispheric, and other transnational contexts. 'Parallel Encounters' reads fashion, television, health, and national security across the border, offers an excellent section on indigenous cultures, and gives us exceptional essays on key texts and poetics. This volume is invaluable for any reader interested in the politics and poetics of the border." -- Winfried Siemerling, University of Waterloo, author of 'The New North American Studies' (2005), co-editor of 'Canada and Its Americas' (2010) "'Parallel Encounters' focuses on cultural productions about Canada and its relationship to the border with the United States and thus draws much-needed attention to a geography that has remained under-examined in hemispheric American and border studies. A wake-up call to fields that have largely remained grounded in US research traditions and perspectives, the collection is the first to bring together the work of scholars working primarily in Canada and the United Kingdom on issues of indigeneity and slavery in the Canadian context, and on a variety of media forms." -- Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University, author of 'Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States' (2008)