Abstract
I began writing this essay one day after Seattle riot police “managed” the crowds protesting the opening of the 2000 World Trade Organization (WTO) Millennium talks. The WTO convened these talks ostensibly to review and renew the series of multilateral trade agreements that the WTO oversees, if not to simulate a liberal democratic public dialogue within the context of late capitalism. By the late fall of 1999, the WTO had, for many, come to symbolize globalization in its purest and most threatening form. It is a non-governmental organization (NGO) operating beyond the control of the nation-states (and their citizens) who are its signatories. Yet at the same time it retains control over and exerts control within those nation-states, and not just in the increasingly diverse realm of “trade,” as the zealous police response to the conference disruption made alarmingly clear. While the WTO and many government officials insist that the organization, and globalization more generally, benefit the economic interests even of latte-sipping protesters (and seem to approve the use of teargas and pepper-spray in order to get that message across), the recent history of the WTO suggests that some of these fears are well founded.
Then what about me
what about the I
confronting you on that border you are always trying to cross?
—Margaret Atwood (“Backdrop” 51)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Anzaldiia, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Atwood, Margaret. “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” The Animals in that Country. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1968.
—. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Ballatine Books, 1987.
Browne, Dennis. “Canada’s Culture/Trade Quandary and the Magazine Case,” Canadian Parliamentary Review 21.3 (Autumn 1998): 19–24.
Buell, Lawrence. “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History 4.2 (Fall 1992): 411–442.
Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “The Cross Border Shopping Issue: A Report,” 1993.
Davey, Frank. Canadian Literary Power. Edmonton, Alberta: New West, 1994.
—. Karla’s Web: a Cultural Investigation of the Mahaffy-French Murders. Toronto: Penguin, 1994.
Giles, Paul. “Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of Exchange,” American Quarterly 50 (1998): 523–547.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Jameson, Fredric. “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997: 54–77.
Jay, Gregory. “The End of American Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice,” The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision in American Literature. Ed. John Alberti. New York: Garland, 1995.
Jay, Paul. “The Myth of America and the Politics of Location: Modernity, Border Studies and the Literatures of the Americas,” Arizona Quarterly 54 (1998): 165–192.
Martinez, Ruben. The Other Side. London: Verso, 1992.
Miyoshi, Masao. “‘Globalization,’ Culture, and the University,” The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997: 247–270.
Muthyala, John. “Reworlding America: the Globalization of American Studies,” Cultural Critique 47 (Spring 2001): 91–119.
New, W. H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.
New Brunswick Ministry of Economic Development and Tourism. “A Discussion Paper on Cross Border Shopping,” January 1992.
Pease, Donald, ed. National Identitites and Post-Americanist Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Pevere, Geoff and Gregg Dymond. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Porter, Carolyn. “What We Know We Don’t Know: Remapping American Studies,” American Literary History 6 (Fall 1994): 467–526.
Radway, Janice. “What’s in a Name?” American Quarterly 51 (1999): 1–32.
Rowe, John Carlos. “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” Cultural Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 11–28.
Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
—. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Taylor, Rupert. “On the Fringes,” Canada and the World Backgrounder 61 (1995): 26–27.
Traister, Bryce. “Risking Nationalism: NAFTA and the Limits of the New American Studies,” Canadian Review of American Studies 27 (1997): 191–204.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2002 Claudia Sadowski-Smith
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Traister, B. (2002). Border Shopping. In: Sadowski-Smith, C. (eds) Globalization on the Line. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09003-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09003-4_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-29483-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-09003-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)