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Discrepant Parallels

Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border

Gillian Roberts author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:McGill-Queen's University Press

Published:22nd May '15

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Discrepant Parallels cover

The 49th parallel has long held a symbolic importance to Canadian cultural nationalists as a strong, though permeable, border. But in contemporary Canadian culture, the border has multiple meanings, and imbalances of cultural power occur both across the Canada-US border as well as within Canada. Discrepant Parallels examines divergent relationships to, and investments in, the Canada-US border in a variety of media, such as travel writing, fiction, poetry, drama, and television. Tracing cultural production in Canada since the 1980s through the periods of FTA and NAFTA negotiations, and into the current, post-9/11 context, Gillian Roberts grapples with the border's changing relevance to Canadian nationalist, Indigenous, African Canadian, and Latin American perspectives. Drawing on Kant and Derrida, she theorizes the 49th parallel to account for the imbalance of cultural, political, and economic power between the two countries, as well as the current challenges to dominant definitions of Canadianness. Focusing on a border that is often overshadowed by the contentious US-Mexico divide, Discrepant Parallels analyzes the desire to establish Canadian-American sameness and difference from a multitude of perspectives, as well as its implications for how Canada is represented within and outside its national borders.

" Gillian Roberts has supplied what has long been a missing component of the transnational turn in American studies: a vibrant, closely argued, and knowledgeable study of how Canada and Canadian studies perspectives crucially contribute to a continental and hemispheric account of national identity and borderlands hybridity." Bryce Traister, University of Western Ontario "[In] this thoughtful book, Roberts turns her attention to the border as a site of intra-national engagements. Wary of a reading of the border that seeks to construct a monolithic Canadianness, Roberts shows how engagements with the border " puncture, temper, supplement, or contradict the culturally dominant view of the border' s significance to Canada" as the marking off of the mythic peaceable kingdom. This is sophisticated, assumption-breaking transnational criticism." Canadian Literature

ISBN: 9780773545052

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

296 pages