Border Studies, Borderlines, and Liminal Spaces: Crossing the Canada-US Border in North American Border Narratives

Abstract

Despite the twenty-first century phenomena of growing internationalism and globalization, of increasingly porous political and cultural borders, and, accordingly, of transnational cultural and literary studies, border studies have, since the mid-1980s, become a significant part of cultural and literary studies. In a North American context, border studies dealt almost exclusively with the Mexico-US border for a long time, and it has been repeatedly noted that the northern North American border, the one between the United States and Canada, had largely been left out of the picture, not least because it had, for long, not been regarded as a particular trouble zone (see “the world’s longest undefended border”). In connection with the debates about NAFTA and, more recently, about border monitoring and enforcement after 9/11, as well as an increasing turn toward a comparative view of Canadian and American literature and culture (see Nischik 2014a and 2014b), the Canada-US border, too, has drawn greater attention not only from politicians, political scientists, and economists, but also from literary and cultural critics.