THE PLACE OF THE CANADA-U.S. BOUNDARY IN BORDER AND INTER-AMERICAN STUDIES

Scholarship on the Canada-U.S. boundary has come late to both Inter-American Studies and the contemporary study of global borders. While the origins of hemispheric studies can be traced to 19th-and early-20th-century work by José Martí and Herbert Eugene Bolton, a host of Inter-American scholarship emerged in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. This work developed topographically comparative models of the Americas, which sometimes also included the Caribbean or (marginally) Canada.¹ Gloria Anzaldúa’s influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1986) employed the borderlands concept to symbolize Chicana opposition to exclusion from the benefits of U.S. citizenship. Her notion of borderlands became one of the guiding metaphors of Chicana/o studies and centrally shaped the emergence of transnational and hemispheric perspectives in U.S. American Studies.² Despite its focus on the Mexico-U.S. boundary, Inter-American Studies has, however, largely ignored the U.S. boundary with its northern neighbor as well as other international borders, thus threatening to replicate the notion of U.S. exceptionalism that an interest in this border geography was originally meant to challenge.