This session brings together literary scholars and historians in Canadian and American studies to explore the complicated histories and imaginative constructions of the Canada-US border. As Black feminist scholar Robyn Maynard argues, Canada has been “seen as an exemplar of human rights,” a reputation that “rests, in part, on its historical role as the safe haven for the enslaved Black Americans who had fled the United States through the Underground Railroad” (4). This perception of Canada as a racial haven has only increased since the election of Donald Trump in 2017: in the face of the travel restrictions of Trump’s so-called “Muslim travel ban,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau encouraged refugees to come to Canada and insisted on what he called “the power of positive politics.” Yet the emphasis on Canada’s moral righteousness often depends on the strategic forgetting of Canada’s own participation in chattel slavery and colonialism. American studies scholars have long recognized how the US nation depended upon a myth of American exceptionalism, a belief that America was “destined to perform a special role in the world of nations” (Pease 108). Yet as this session will demonstrate, the myth of Canadian exceptionalism has had a long history as well.

Drawing from a rich variety of expressive forms, including literature, photography, public memorials, and personal narratives, the papers of this session investigate how the rhetoric of Canadian exceptionalism, frequently articulated in reference to the Canada-US border, has obscured forms of racialized violence in Canada and has also led to the exclusion of non-white peoples from an imagined Canadian community. How does the myth of Canadian exceptionalism function in the present day? How has it functioned to enable some kinds of freedom while limiting others? What narratives about race and national belonging does it continue to perpetuate? The presentations of this session join scholarly conversations by authors such as Gillian Roberts, Winfried Siemerling, and Bryce Traister, who work to situate the Canada-US relationship in hemispheric and transnational studies and call for a “critical borderlands practice” (Traister 34) that can confront the enduring colonial legacy of the Canada-US border.

In “Cartographies of Japanese Internment in the US-Canadian Maritime Borderlands,” Alex Olson examines the ideological struggle over the legacy of Japanese internment on Mayne Island, an island located in the Canadian waters of the Salish Sea in the US-Canadian borderlands. Prior to 1942, Japanese-Canadians comprised roughly a third of the population of Mayne Island in British Columbia; yet during the Second World War, the entire Japanese community of the island was forced to evacuate. Since then, Mayne Island has been divided by conflicting memorial impulses: reconciliation efforts such as the Japanese Memorial Garden, which acknowledges the histories of Japanese-Canadian families on the island, compete with private signage establishing current land ownership and the personal stories, memories, and cartographies of internment offered by the diaspora of Japanese families. Yet narratives of Japanese internment in Canada have historically been overlooked in favor of popular narratives about the US history of Japanese internment, such as the novel Snow Falling on Cedars. Olson’s research investigates how popular understandings of Japanese internment as a primarily US phenomenon have threatened this island’s Japanese-Canadian history and have drawn attention away from the role of Canada in the racial policing of the Salish Sea.

The next two papers follow in this line of inquiry by examining the way another racial narrative—the Underground Railroad—has shaped historical, contemporary, and fictionalized representations of racial conflict and racial policing in North America. In “‘New Underground Railroad’ Rhetoric in Contemporary Canada-US Border Crossing”, Alyssa MacLean studies media representations of the clandestine passage of migrants across the Canada-US border since the election of Donald Trump. As Jennifer Andrews has pointed out, these border crossings have been widely troped as a “New Underground Railroad.” This rhetoric of the “New Underground Railroad” competes with what American studies scholar Alicia Schmidt Camacho calls the “porous border narrative” of the US-Mexico border. Yet the “New Underground Railroad” trope enables a narrative of Canadian exceptionalism that overlooks Canada’s history of slavery and its current detention practices towards migrants. MacLean’s analysis of the visual rhetoric of Canada-US border-crossing will show how the New Underground Railroad has enabled the Canadian government to control migrant populations and advance larger arguments about the nation-state’s protective role.

Finally, Jennifer Andrews’s “Rewriting the Myth of the Underground Railroad and Canada as the North Star in the Twenty-First Century: Reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad” considers how Black American writer Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad challenges how and why America’s northern neighbour has come to view itself as the embodiment of “tolerance and benevolence” (Maynard 26). Whitehead invokes a trajectory towards Canada for his enslaved protagonist, yet pointedly refashions it: Cora heads west, rather than north. Through this unusual trajectory, Whitehead raises fundamental questions about how Canada has cultivated and perpetuated a stance of “exceptionality” in order to differentiate itself from the United States. Using the ambiguous imagery of the International Underground Railroad Memorial (a monument erected in 2001 on both sides of the Canada-US border) as a tangible framework for the fictional world Whitehead creates, Andrews analyzes how Cora’s travels challenge Canada’s mythic status as a terminus of the Underground Railroad.

These papers will show how literature, media, and popular memory construct arguments about Canada’s role in the world. To ensure a lively discussion, Mary Chapman, who will be presiding over the session, will enforce a 18-minute limit on each presentation.