Borderlands: How We Talk About Canada (Brenda and David McLean Canadian Studies) - Softcover

New, W. H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0774806591 ISBN 13: 9780774806596

Publisher: UBC Press, 1998

Synopsis

This book traces some of the ways in which border metaphors pervade Canadian consciousness. Addressing a variety of social issues -- among them, separatism, marginalization, multiculturalism, colonial attitudes, national policies, language, and the influence of the United States. W.H. New shows how the border, though spatial in character, is political in intent and effect.

About this title

About the Author

W.H. New teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He held the McLean Chair in Canadian Studies at UBC from 1995 to 1997.

Review

Within the borderlands that separate and join Canadians and Americans, the Canadian search for difference goes on. (Jeffrey Simpson The Globe and Mail)

What New has to say is important since he recasts the issues of national identity in a post-modernist fin de siècle ambiguity... New acknowledges new issues that have fundamentally challenged national boundaries, such as the multinational corporation, multiculturalism, and aboriginal identity. (Anthony W. Rasporich Western Historical Quarterly)

... it would be a shame if New’s thoughtful and thought-provoking volume were overlooked because Borderlands is one of those rare books that work on many carefully layered levels: literary, poetic, philosophical and political. ... a rich tapestry. (Georgia Straight, October 15-22, 1998)

Under the general title of Borderlands, the three related essays in this monograph address the rhetoric of border/boundary in Canadian studies and its social, political, and cultural implications, the character of cultural responses to Canada-US border tensions, and two specific examples of how border transgressions continue to affect current Washington State and British Columbia cultural expression.

A number of motifs appear throughout these essays, including the politics of separation, the persistence of racist discourse in North America (and of attempts to counter it), the role of education in informing public debate, the existence of communally-held social values in Canada, the necessity of the arts, the power of language, and the relation between social choice and indeterminacy.

The first essay, 'Giddy Limits,' ranges the most widely, drawing on examples from history and literature, geography and popular culture. It elucidates the politics of various recurrent rhetorical strategies in Canadian cultural commentary. The second essay, 'The Edge of Everything,' pursues a series of specific applications of 'border rhetoric' (including irony, national policies, and oppositional strategies) to Canada-US relations. The third essay, 'The Centre of Somewhere Else,' looks in part at the rhetoric of two contemporary writers (Seattle's David Guterson and Victoria's Jack Hodgins) in relation to the 1859 Pig War and to curricular reform. This final essay demonstrates further how the large issues raised in the first two essays resonate both in historical narrative and in contemporary social and cultural practice.

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0774806591
• ISBN 13: 9780774806596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128