Book Review: Borderlands: How We Talk About Canada

In Borderlands (1998) W.H. New contextualizes the meaning and metaphor of border in Canadian Studies, and in doing so makes a strong case for what Canada is rather than what it is not. He notes, "I want to argue that the paradigms of boundary rhetoric variously construct Canada as a place that includes, a place that excludes, as a place divided, as a place that distributes resources and power, and as a place that embraces some ongoing principle of boundary negotiation" (5).

Very significant to my own work is the way he analyzes lines of latitude. He writes, "Numbered parallels of latitude (and meridians of longitude)--however placidly we might accept them--do count their way politically around the globe, not neutrally..." (21). More specifically, he explains, how such lines demarcating border become "an interval of resonance" (36). New writes, "They construct cliches of similarity and difference. They set up border fields of confrontation, resistance, occasional ignorance, and often uneasy embrace" (36). He reiterates his assertions of the signifying difference of perceptions of land that he addressed in Land Sliding, this time applying his analysis more specifically to perceptions of borderlines, noting that one's positionality affects what presumptions are encoded and decoded.

He also spends a great deal of time addressing the perpetuation of a perceived inferiority complex that hampers an appreciation of Canada's cultural strengths and calls on Canadians to embrace a sense of agency toward their own cultural significance. He writes, "...we have to insist on a system of public education that encourages, rather than impedes, an imaginative understanding of the way Canadians live. We have to think of Canadian Studies as the text of our lives, not as the subset of the real text, the mere local application of the 'real truths' that other people, in other people's centres and other people's times, have somehow, with universal insight, divined" (102).