TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
introduction: Introduction Imagining North America - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0001
[maps, American cultural study, Continental Divides, transnational turn, North American borders]
Maps are not just guides to the world as we know it; they can also be projections of the way we desire or fear it to be. The discussion of maps is a point of departure for a book that seeks to rethink the geographic imaginary of American cultural study by shifting its borders and providing new frames of analysis. This book is inspired by, and seeks to contribute to, what has been called the “transnational turn” in American literary and cultural studies. It aspires to a genuinely comparative view of North American borders that locates them in relation to one another and to borders in other parts of the world. Historically, the study of slave narratives has emphasized the U.S.–Canadian border, locating freedom to the north and idealizing Canada as the slaves' Promised Land. (pages 1 - 28)
This chapter is available at:
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Before the Border: Indigenous Geographies of North America - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0002
[North America, borderlands, cultural geographies, routes, inhabited, history]
A map of North America covers the ground in Mohawk artist Shelley Niro's 1996 installation The Border. The transnational perspectives offered by Chicano/a border studies have much to contribute to the study of North American Indian history and culture. This chapter taps into histories of North America's borderlands that are often overlooked in the emphasis on Mexican–Anglo cultures along the U.S.–Mexico border. In the process, it relies on cultural geographies that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state, geographies defined not by the borders of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, but by the routes and roots established by people who inhabited the land long before the first European arrivals, and whose lifeways were profoundly reconfigured by the conquest. (pages 29 - 60)
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Fugitive Geographies: Rerouting the Stories of North American Slavery - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0003
[slave narratives, North American slavery, fugitive slaves, transatlantic slave trade, stories]
This chapter examines the very different place of national borders in slave and neo-slave narratives about flight to Canada and Mexico. What these narratives reveal is that for fugitives eager to escape the United States, the border is not a divisive obstacle but a welcome conduit to liberty. Historically, the study of slave narratives has emphasized the U.S.–Canadian border, locating freedom to the north and idealizing Canada as the slaves' Promised Land. This chapter is concerned with how and why the north acquired its privileged, quasi-mythic status, and how this geographical convention has prevented more nuanced views of Canada's role in the history of slavery on the continent. A discussion of North and South in nineteenth-century representations of slavery provides a backdrop for the discussion of the geographic imaginary of late twentieth-century neo-slave narratives. (pages 61 - 100)
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chapter three Women of the South Bank: the Mexican Routes of American Modernism - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0004
[modernismo, Mexico, culture, routes, Mexican culture, American modernism]
This chapter focuses on the modernist cultures of North America that have relatively little to do with modernismo. Latin Americanists have been critical of the way that modernism has become synonymous with European cultural developments, effectively eclipsing modernist production in other parts of the world. It would subsequently be much more difficult for foreigners to view Mexico as a place devoid of culture. The Mexican culture would continue to exert a formative, if often unacknowledged, influence on the arts across North America. Until now, the Mexicanist presence in American modernism has been recognized primarily through the towering reputations of the muralists. Focusing on how modernism traveled, particularly along less well-illuminated routes, inevitably points the way to women like Porter, Brenner, and Modotti, who were conduits and producers of an American modernism anchored in Mexico. (pages 101 - 148)
This chapter is available at:
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Jack Kerouac's North America - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0005
[Jack Kerouac, North America, linguistic border, history, literary, culture]
This chapter discusses Jack Kerouac, an author whose work is most commonly situated in the context of the U.S. literary history, as a North American whose connections to Mexico and Canada were essential to his artistic vision. Kerouac is a particularly important figure because he is one of the very few North American authors for whom Canada, the United States, and Mexico were equally meaningful. The discussion of Kerouac's North America provides a revealing look at the possibilities and obstacles to the circulation of culture across national and linguistic borders. Describing this iconic American author as North American underscores the importance of French Canada and Mexico to Kerouac's literary production, vectors of his life and career that are lost when the interpretation of his work and influences remains centered on the U.S. context. (pages 149 - 188)
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Continental Ops: Crossing Borders in North American Crime Narrative - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0006
[cross-border, North Americans, crime, detective novels, genres, national borders]
This chapter explains how detective novels from Canada, the United States, and Mexico have approached the subject of cross-border crime, and what those representations tell about how North Americans view their closest neighbors. The contemporary North American detective novels from three very different cultural contexts provide a revealing example of what Fredric Jameson called an “ideology of form,” the implicit beliefs and values that reside in a work's generic structure. Genres tell documents of the institutions and values that are important to a given society. When they migrate across borders, it becomes especially apparent which values travel and which are rooted in a very particular place and time. The detective novel, which explores the commission of crime and the restoration of order, has proved to be a vital medium for North Americans to reflect on their place in an increasingly integrated continent where people and things move across national borders. (pages 189 - 218)
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The Northern Borderlands and Latino / a Canadian Diaspora - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0007
[Verdecchia, Canadian context, American culture, Latino border cultures, El Norte, boderlands]
This chapter focuses on Verdecchia, who situates his reflections in a decidedly Canadian context where borders have a very different resonance, and where allusions to Latino and Latin American cultures have very little resonance at all. Although his work is influenced by the art and politics of U.S. Chicano, he is wary of the tendency to conflate all Latino border cultures with the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the erasure of Canada from accounts of inter-American culture that focus exclusively on relations between the United States and Latin America. By introducing Canadian characters and settings, his work gives new coordinates for locating “El Norte,” while at the same time disrupting the binary between north and south with a necessary third term. (pages 219 - 240)
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epilogue The Nafta Superhighway and the Limits of North American Community - Adams Rachel
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226005539.003.0008
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Notes
Bibliography
Index
