The Literatures of the Mexico-US and Canada-US Borders

Abstract

Cultural productions about the US boundaries with Mexico and Canada have a long history, but have surged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The settings of these works are so closely interlinked with their subject matter that the fiction could not easily be moved to another place without distortion or loss of significance. While literatures about the Mexico-US border have been afforded a considerable amount of attention, fewer cultural representations of the United States’ northern boundary exist. A comparative approach to literatures about the Mexico-US and Canada-US borders questions assumptions that have undergirded the development of hemispheric American Studies in the United States, to which work on the Mexico-US border has been central.¹