The Leverhulme Trust-funded Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network is pleased to invite proposals for papers or panels addressing topics related to cultural production, consumption, and reception across the Canada-US border. The 49th parallel has been considered by many Canadian nationalists to symbolize Canada’s cultural independence from the United States, with attendant anxieties about how an “undefended” border might fail to safeguard Canadian culture adequately. This conference seeks to probe the implications for the production, consumption, and reception of literature, film, television, music, theatre, and visual art in relation to the Canada-US border. We encourage analysis of cultural texts, phenomena, and industries both in terms of how they might operate differently in Canada and the United States and the ways in which they might straddle, or ignore, the border altogether. We invite proposals on both contemporary and historical cultural texts and contexts.
Author Archives: Michael K. Bess
CFP: Cultural Crossings: Production, Consumption, and Reception across the Canada-U.S. Border
Veins Across the Border: Building the Monterrey-Reynosa Highway and Its Impact on Everyday Life in Northern Mexico
The following essay is drawn from my dissertation research, which covers road building and motor travel in Mexico from 1920-1952.
The celebrations that commemorated highway openings in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands reveal the optimism and ambitions that local communities had for greater binational engagement. In September 1941, for example, thousands of people gathered in Monterrey from across the region to inaugurate the new road to Reynosa, Tamaulipas. It was a great spectacle. The city police’s mariachi band and a travelling orchestra from Laredo, Texas played open-air concerts, while vendors lined the streets selling food and trinkets to visitors. Political speeches filled the day. Even the transit authority joined in the festivities, organizing a park for children to play-act driving with miniature automobiles and learn about motor safety.[1] These events evoked a sense of community, reflecting a passage from President Manuel Ávila Camacho’s first state of the union address: “It is not possible to truly integrate a sense of the nation without an ample road network that facilitates economic exchange [and] connects human groups.”[2] Continue reading
Foucauldian Landscapes: Re-Envisioning the Forgotten Spaces of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands examines the industrial development of the Arizona-Sonora border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Major themes include the significance of railroads and mining operations as conveyors of modernity, environmental and social challenges to technological growth, and the relationship between labor and capital during this period. He proposes the idea of the “fugitive landscape” as a space where environmental and social conditions can lead to technology failure and the frustration of state-corporate endeavors to extend their influence. The governments of Mexico and the United States, in conjunction with their business allies, sought to exert control over the borderlands by regulating and regimenting the bodies of new settlers who arrived to work in rail construction, mining, and other ventures. They deployed “apparatuses of security” to police these populations and separate them from Native American communities that resisted the modern nation-state. Michel Foucault’s theoretical frameworks of governmentality and bio-power are useful to explore the transformations wrought by the deployment of public and private institutions in the borderlands, alongside industrial technology, which served to extend the reach of modernity to a once “fugitive” space.
Borderlands History 