Continental Divides
Remapping the Cultures of North America
North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.
“Rachel Adams’s Continental Divides is a major contribution to North American literary and cultural studies. Through her provocative readings of such ‘borderlands’ figures as Martin Delany, Thomas King, Tina Modotti, Jack Kerouac, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Guillermo Verdecchia, Adams develops new comparative perspectives on the uneven but often constitutive relations among Canadian, U.S., and Mexican cultures. This beautifully written book is a call to arms for a disciplinary remapping of the field imaginary of American studies.”—Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland
“Theoretically sophisticated and covering a huge range of material—visual art, photography, and popular culture as well as the fictions of high modernism—Rachel Adams’s new book reorients the traditional east-west narrative of transatlantic influence to reconsider the idea of North America from a north-south hemispheric perspective. Remapping the historical terrain from a twenty-first-century perspective, Continental Divides will become a classic study of crossovers and frictions among the cultures of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.”—Paul Giles, University of Oxford
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION / Imagining North America
ONE / Before the Border: Indigenous Geographies of North America
TWO / Fugitive Geographies: Rerouting the Stories of North American Slavery
THREE / Women of the South Bank: The Mexican Routes of American Modernism
FOUR / Jack Kerouac’s North America
FIVE / Continental Ops: Crossing Borders in North American Crime Narrative
SIX / The Northern Borderlands and Latino/a Canadian Diaspora
EPILOGUE / The Nafta Superhighway and the Limits of North American Community
Notes
Bibliography
IndexLiterature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
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