Reading between the Borderlines

Book excerpt: Is Superman Canadian? Who decides, and what is at stake in such a question? How is the Underground Railroad commemorated differently in Canada and the United States, and can those differences be bridged? How can we acknowledge properly the Canadian labour behind Hollywood filmmaking, and what would that do to our sense of national cinema? Reading between the Borderlines grapples with these questions and others surrounding the production and consumption of literary, cinematic, musical, visual, and print culture across the Canada-US border. Discussing a range of popular as well as highbrow cultural forms, this collection investigates patterns of cross-border cultural exchange that become visible within a variety of genres, regardless of their place in any arbitrarily devised cultural hierarchy. The essays also consider the many interests served, compromised, or negated by the operations of the transnational economy, the movement of culture's "raw material" across nation-state borders in literal and conceptual terms, and the configuration of a material citizenship attributed to or negotiated around border-crossing cultural objects. Challenging the oversimplification of cultural products labelled either "Canadian" or "American," Reading between the Borderlines contends with the particularities and complications of North American cultural exchange, both historically and in the present.