Borders, Culture, and Globalization

The idea of treating Canada as a Borderland community has been around for over fifty years but it has never had much appeal to historians, primarily because of the lack of a clear definition of a Borderland and Borderlanders or the new term that Borders, Culture, and Globalization throws into the mix, a Border culture. The editors declare that '[t]his border culture, like the border itself, is socially constructed, mainly by people who reside close to the border and live with its effects of coincident separation and linkage, the constant change and motion surrounding the line, the meshed or delineated identities that emerge, and the innovative and exemplary production and expression of imagination and creativity focused on the border' (p. 8). In Chapter 1 Lee Rodney complains that 'Border regions and borderlands are not celebrated or articulated in the same way that national cultures are' (p. 43). Perhaps that is because borders are not 'socially constructed'. The American-Canadian border has existed in its present form since the late nineteenth century and two distinct national cultures have emerged, one on either side of the border. The editors proclaim the Pacific coast of Canada and the United States, often described as Cascadia, 'stands out with the distinctive and demonstrative expressions of border culture' (p. 8). Yet Cascadia is a purely imaginative construct, without clear boundaries and very little support among British Columbians, most of whom think of themselves as Canadians, not Cascadians. In fact, most of the case studies in the book examine much narrower 'border cultures'. Two chapters focus on the Windsor-Detroit relationship. Lee Rodney complains that books on the history of Windsor 'only tangentially reference Detroit', even though Windsor was really 'one of many Detroit neighbourhoods rather than a border town of another country' (pp. 45-6). I suspect that this would come as surprise to most of those who have lived in Windsor over the last two centuries. Michael Darroch contributes an interesting article explaining how the fact that the inhabitants of Windsor can see the bright lights of Detroit at night has shaped their views of the city, but it is not entirely clear how this has led to any sense of a distinctive border culture. Chapter 4 contains a discussion of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Windsor on Border Cultures, which the curator claims 'energized, multiplied, and reconfigured the gallery space as an active, malleable and responsive participant in creating a vernacular, decolonizing public space' (p. 127), but it is not clear what the exhibition actually contributed to the theme of this book. Sandra Vandervolk turns to Stansted, Québec and Derby Line, Vermont, two communities that literally straddle the border. Vandervolk finds that the Canadians, even if they hold dual citizenship (largely because they were born in the nearest hospital, which happened to be on the American side of the border) clearly identify themselves as Canadians, just as the Americans clearly define themselves as Americans. She still insists that a borderland identity exists 'in the intersubjective spaces between people, as an aspect of a life-world' (p. 180)! The best chapters are, in fact, those that stray the furthest from the Borderlands concept. Melissa Kelly studies the Canadian snowbirds who spend part of the winter in gated communities in Florida, alongside middle-class white Americans also seeking the sun. Snowbird migration, she suggests, 'represents the largest case of sustained face-to-face interaction between Americans and Canadians' and 'may be contributing to a new form of continental integration' (p. 132). But the results of her interesting survey of Canadian snowbirds indicates the reverse: they were 'happy' to be Canadian, saw Canada 'as a superior country' to the United States, and showed little interest in becoming American citizens. Alexander Rudolph raises some interesting questions about the problem of protecting Canadian culture from the influence of American online streaming and video services (which he describes as an 'on-line borderland'). But his conclusion that 'a North American culture', with limited input from Canadians, is 'likely to emerge' (p. 200) is not convincing. There are two good chapters discussing Indigenous culture and the border. What both show is that the Indigenous peoples, at least those living on reserves, do not see themselves as Borderlanders, but want to have full sovereignty and a recognition of their own distinct 'national' identities. --Phillip Buckner, University of New Brunswick ""https: //www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/bjcs.2022.13""