Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America's Frontier Imagination 9781138842243, 9781315731698

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Looking Beyond Borderlines

American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that correlates with the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American culture. This book focuses on the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America, specifically the ways in which they have been imaged and imagined since their formation in the 19th century and how tropes of visuality are central to their production and meaning. Rodney links ongoing discussions in political geography and visual culture in new ways to demonstrate how contemporary American borders exhibit security as a display strategy that is resisted and undermined through a variety of cultural practices. Lee Rodney is Associate Professor of Media Art Histories and Visual Culture at the University of Windsor where she is currently Co-Director of the InTerminus Research Group. An interdisciplinary writer/curator, she has published on contemporary art, visual culture and urbanism in a range of books and publications including The Informal Market Worlds Atlas, Cartographies of Place, Future Anterior, Space and Culture, Parallax, Prefix Photo and PAJ: Performance Art Journal. Recent curatorial projects include the Border Bookmobile and the Frontier Files (frontierfiles.org).

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

For a full list of titles in this series please visit www.routledge.com 11 On Not Looking The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Edited by Frances Guerin 12 Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices Tim Stott 13 Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art Meiqin Wang 14 Photography and Place Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 Donna West Brett 15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics Wes Hill 16 Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism David Houston Jones 17 Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth and Siv B. Fjærstad 18 Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes 19 Looking Beyond Borderlines North America’s Frontier Imagination Lee Rodney

Looking Beyond Borderlines North America’s Frontier Imagination

Lee Rodney

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Lee Rodney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Rodney, Lee, author. Title: Looking beyond borderlines : North America's frontier imagination / by Lee Rodney. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies ; 19 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016026500 | ISBN 9781138842243 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Boundaries in art. | Boundaries—Anthropological aspects. | Nationalism and art—United States. | Nationalism and collective Memory—United States. | United States—Boundaries—Canada. | United States—Boundaries—Mexico. | Canada—Boundaries—United States. | Mexico—Boundaries—United States. Classification: LCC N8217.B63 R63 2016 | DDC 700/.4581—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026500 ISBN: 978-1-138-84224-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73169-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line

vii ix 1

PART I

The Territorial Imagination

21

1

Framing the Frontier: From Survey to Surveillance

23

2

Homeland as Home Front: Terror, Territory and Television

56

PART II

Mobile Frontiers 3

4

75

Exhibiting the Frontier: Thresholds and Checkpoints as Museological Projects

77

Canada as the Borderline Case: “Outer America” and the Northern Frontier

99

PART III

Modalities of Dissensus

125

5

Psychogeography after NAFTA

127

6

Sites of Dissensus: Aesthetics after the Border

153

vi

Contents

7

Have You Left the American Sector? Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle

178

Conclusion

199

Bibliography Index

201 213

Figures

1.1 1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2

Annual Rings, Dennis Oppenheim, 1968, USA–Canada boundary at Fort Kent, Maine and Clair, New Brunswick Falls of the Rio Salado, John E. Weyss, 1859, from the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Made under the Direction of William H. Emory Arthur Schott, topographic sketch with cacti, 1859, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Arthur Schott’s illustration of the Seminole chief, NocoShimatt-Tash-Tanaki, 1859, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Chippewa wigwams and grave on one of the islands at the Northwest Angle, Lake of the Woods. Captain D.R. Cameron, Commissioner, is at right sitting by an Indian grave, 1872 Log taken from reference monument, Northwest Angle, 1872 Group of dead Crow Indians that were killed by the Piegans during the winter of 1873–1874 Mode of disposing of the dead among the Indians. Three-hundred miles west of Red River, 1872–1875 Department of Homeland Security advertising campaign, mall kiosk, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2014 Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas, 2008 Border Patrol Museum sign, El Paso, Texas, 2008 Border Patrol Museum, Wall of Support, El Paso, Texas, 2008 Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 Ronald Reagan room, Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 Canadian Experience Pavilion “Fake Lake,” Toronto G20 Summit Police car on fire, Toronto G20 Summit

24

30

33

35

43 44 46 47 62 81 82 83 86 88 89 102 103

viii Figures 4.3

4.4

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5.1

5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1

7.2 7.3 7.4

Alana Bartol and Camille Turner, “Reading the verdict of Josiah Cutan at the river,” from Landscape of Forgetting, Neighborhood Spaces symposium, Windsor, Ontario, 2014 Alana Bartol and Camille Turner, Landscape of Forgetting, documents from Windsor Community Museum, Neighborhood Spaces symposium, Windsor, Ontario, 2014 Amendments to Continental Refusal/Refus Continental, map of North America, Greg Curnoe, 1972 Canadian Rangers, Baffin Island, Nunavut, August 24, 2014 Bubble, Arctic Wonderland series, Sarah Anne Johnson, 2011 Letter to William, Bonnie Devine, 2008 States of Exception, installation created by Richard Barnes and Amanda Krugliak based upon the archive of Jason De León, 2013 Drainage ditch mural under Bridge of the Americas, Juárez, Mexico, 2008 Idle No More, border shutdown, Bluewater Bridge, Sarnia Ontario, January 17, 2013 Culvert crossing, Political Equator 3, June 2011 Culvert crossing, Political Equator 3, June 2011 Postcommodity, Repellent Fence, October 2015 and ongoing Ron Terada, YOU HAVE LEFT THE AMERICAN SECTOR/VOUS ÊTES SORTIS DU SECTEUR AMÉRICAIN, 2005 Because . . . there Was and there Wasn’t a City of Baghdad, Jamelie Hassan billboard/Artcite, 1991 Cross-Border Communications, Broken City Lab, Windsor–Detroit border, 2009 Agamiing, Awasaakwaa (On the Shore, Across the Forest), Dylan Miner, 2013

110

111 112 115 117 119

133 142 149 168 169 173

179 183 187 191

Acknowledgments

This book has taken the better part of eight years to research and write, initially taking me far away from the familiar academic territory of my Ph.D. research. In this I have a lot of people to thank. My first debt is to the Canada–US Fulbright Program, which helped me begin exploratory research on North American borders in 2008. Through the assistance of key faculty at Arizona State University, I was quickly immersed in the place and politics of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, meeting a number of people who were instrumental to my thinking on North American borderlands discourse. I would like to thank Amira de la Garza, Daniel Arreola, Chris Brown, Erik Lee, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, David Taylor, Francisco Lara-Valencia, and Rick Van Schoik who all shared their time and knowledge with me over six months in the US–Mexico borderlands. In the Detroit–Windsor region, where I have lived for over a decade, I have had the pleasure of learning from conversations with Andrew Herscher, Dylan Miner, Catharine Mastin, Chris McNamara, Marcel O’Gorman, Michael Darroch and Srimoyee Mitra, as well as countless people living here on either side of the Canada–US border. The Border Bookmobile project, which I began in 2009, was funded by the University of Windsor and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It enabled me to expand and trace the political, cultural and economic currents that have shaped the various places that share a land border with the continental US. The presentation of the Border Bookmobile project in a variety of places, from its home base in Windsor–Detroit, eastward to Toronto, Farmington (Maine) and London (UK) has led to important conversations that I have had with Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar, Justin Langlois, Adam Lauder, Troy Ouellette, June Pak, Peter Mortenboeck, Helge Mooshammer, Sigi Torinus and Jose Seoane who have all contributed in significant ways to the conceptual development of this book. The Art Gallery of Windsor and the Interminus Research Group have been important collaborators in bringing debate on borderlands research to this region. I also owe thanks to the University of Windsor, particularly

x

Acknowledgements

Erica Stevens-Abbitt, Antonio Rossini and Nancy Wright who provided me with research leave during a time of economic constraint. Although this book is at an intellectual and geographical remove from my graduate studies, there are important theoretical currents that have stuck with me, guiding my thinking in this project. I would like to acknowledge the lasting influence of my Ph.D. supervisor, Gavin Butt at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose thinking on performativity helped set the theoretical foundations of this project, as well as Irit Rogoff whose early work on the intersections of visual culture, art and geography have resonated with me in thinking through contemporary debates on migration. The late Professor Barbara Godard of York University (Toronto) also taught me valuable insights on cultural translation over twenty years ago. Parts of Chapters 3 and 7 have been developed from essays previously published in Space and Culture and the Journal for Curatorial Studies, as well as in Cartographies of Place (Eds. Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault). Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Routledge has been exceedingly patient waiting on the final manuscript and the detailed, generous comments of three anonymous reviewers guided the manuscript from its early stages. My friends and colleagues have spent many hours providing feedback and assistance with manuscript preparation: Kiki Athanassiadis, Karen Engle, Mike Darroch, Ken Giles, and Stephanie Polsky. Thanks also to John McKay and José Séoane for assistance in Spanish translation, both linguistic and cultural. This book is dedicated to my parents Christine and Wayne Rodney for having confidence in my idiosyncratic career choices, as well as my partner Andy whose absurd insights and shoe videos kept the project light enough to bring to completion.

Introduction Sight and Site on the Line

The first time I drove into Mexico I triggered an alarm for secondary inspection. Almost immediately, our car was pulled over by Mexican guards running toward us with assault rifles. My friend and I got out while the car was examined and I looked back anxiously at the border wall from close range on the Mexican side. Close up it filled my field of vision with rounds of razor wire that looked to be a meter in diameter. The daunting arrangement and scale of the enclosure we found ourselves in seemed almost medieval, less strategic than theatrical. Our brush with the Mexican authorities was brief, ten minutes at most, though it was the beginning of a day in Nogales that brought us through a series of fortified spaces that define many border towns and cities now. This view of the security complex that has grown around the US–Mexico border has motivated many of the questions that this book considers. While these questions have been informed by the various sites of American borderlines, the role of sight in framing the border as a product of visuality is one of the driving theoretical concerns in this book. The relationship between sight and site is pressed into service in the creation and maintenance of borders, and I argue that images have been critical to border formations: from the first border surveys of the 19th century, which were reliant on the image of landscape as territory, to images produced by contemporary surveillance technologies that track our movements across borders through biometric markers such as fingerprints, iris scans and backscatter X-rays. While the chronological framework of the book begins in the 19th century this starting point is not the beginning of a historical survey of images of North American borders. Rather, my aim is to locate how visuality operates in the establishment and control of national borders, both during the borders’ initial geographic survey and during the tumultuous shifts of the last two decades. These transitional periods have relied heavily on images for different ends: in the first instance, connecting territory to the national imagination in the 19th century and, more recently, as an anxious marker of American identity. In our era of networked intelligence and enigmatic networked threats, shadowy mediatized images of human migration and smuggling have been central to repositioning the border as a site of danger.

2

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line

The various ways in which the border is framed through images offer a critical context for the concomitant power struggles and protests, both overt and covert, that have emerged in the last few decades. Land borders and ports of entry to the United States are often said to have undergone a process of “hardening” or “thickening” after a period of relative openness prior to the 1990s.1 However, the significance of the American border, whether experienced as a gateway or barrier, is not only a product of surveillance technologies, military presence or large-scale reconstruction, it is also produced through a wide and contradictory range of images that give meaning to the abstraction of a line. Thus, Looking Beyond Borderlines considers the interplay between the shifting idea of the frontier and its implications for the concept of the border during three periods: during the initial surveys when the border was established as a colonial instrument to manage the frontier, during the Cold War as the idea of the frontier was reimagined as an ideological state apparatus, and after the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 when the border became physically more significant and virtually extended through new surveillance and screening programs. Political analyses of borders, geopolitics and security have tended to focus on border policy alone, but there is growing interest in how visual culture shapes both contemporary security policy and the varied counter cultural practices that contest existing social and economic forces regulated by contemporary borders. David Campbell and Michael Shapiro speak to the contested terrain of the image in this milieu where visual culture is at work in making visible potential security threats, while at the same time functioning as a deconstructive strategy that can unmask the ways in which people are rendered invisible within contemporary securitization and militarization processes. They see visual culture as “implicated in new military strategies, at the same time as it enables critical practices contesting those military strategies.”2 Nicholas Mirzoeff has further qualified this distinction in setting up visuality and counter-visuality as counterposed strategies within modernity, the former working through colonialism and imperialism to imagine and control territories and subjects, while the latter serves as a revolutionary force to upset these dominant modes of visualization and control.3 Looking Beyond Borderlines takes up these approaches to visual culture by considering the cultural politics of the gaze toward the border, not as a fixed site but rather as a shifting concept with implications that have moved beyond the international boundary lines themselves. The historical boundary markers established along the Canada–US and Mexico–US land borders now seem like quaint and ineffectual reminders of the territorial divisions set up long ago as part of a 19th-century imperial vision. The concrete and marble obelisks set in place during this time now serve as moorings to help guide the maintenance of the international boundary lines, lines that continually disappear as natural forces shift the surrounding landscape. Much of the Canada–US border cuts through

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 3 dense boreal forest, while the Mexico–US border contends with the drifting sands of the Sonoran Desert, or the unpredictability of the Rio Grande. These natural processes slowly work to erase international boundary lines, while the economic forces of neoliberal trade policy and transnational corporations have served to reproduce the borderlands in their own image. Borders are always precarious constructs, but the US border was understood as an especially fragile entity after the events of 9/11 as it became a primary site of national insecurity. Nominally visible and conceptually undermined by the ideals of globalization, the US border also became a serious representational issue—a problem of “optics”—at a time when border concepts more generally were shifting from fixed territorial locations to remote, virtual and spatially complex entities. Didier Bigo questions the idea of contemporary borders as a physical limit between interior and exterior of the nation by employing the metaphor of the Möbius strip to emphasize that what appears as two surfaces is in fact one.4 If the inside is connected to the outside, the border no longer works as a definitive limit as is implied by the architecture of security walls and fences. These challenges trouble the idea of the border as a physical location and a national boundary. At the outset of the 21st century, American borders have been rethought and reconfigured along lines of visibility: as security threats become more difficult to detect, borders have become more prominent and more visible. This book traces how the re-conception and reconstruction of the US border circulates through seemingly disparate kinds of images. The most widely disseminated images of the border include the large-scale, geo-engineering projects along the US–Mexico boundary and their production of landscapes of control and surveillance that violently divide territory through the construction of fences, vehicle barriers, and traffic management systems. But, since 2002, the US Department of Homeland Security has also produced its own bureaucratic vision of the border as a highly ordered and technologized gateway that sorts danger from safety, centring on the unprecedented and uncanny use of the term “homeland.”5 The border also becomes visible as a problem through the figure of the immigrant (often conflated with the figure of the terrorist) in countless news reports and reality TV shows. And it is turned into a performative play of visibility and invisibility through numerous works of art and activism, where the border is often framed as a question or a process rather than a fait accompli. I ask why the idea of the border—as a territorial boundary and a technological membrane—has become so important within North American culture in the last few decades. We have heard American politicians repeatedly refer to the border as both “porous” and “leaky” while violence from Mexico is said to “spill over” into the US.6 These contemporary visions of American territory as a bucket or a ship, a container or a vessel, metaphorically suggest that the fluid dynamics of globalization have become too turbulent: hence the United States of America is variously

4

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line

presented as a nation that is coming apart at the seams or afloat in a sea of terror. Within this metaphorical context the border becomes the messy and threatening edge, the focal point for anxiety and powerful public image of national strength and resilience in the face of change. One need only look to the US Border Patrol’s sponsorship of a car in NASCAR’s racing circuit as well as its “protecting the nation” campaign to see how these kinds of images command nationalist sentiment for many Americans. While the American border symbolizes the fortification of national territory against the precarity of globalization, it also seems to serve as a kind of guardian of American identity that has no figurative equivalent in Canada or Mexico, where the border largely remains an issue dictated by American policy. The territorial boundaries of the US and the architecture of large-scale checkpoints serve as the most obvious manifestations of a reconfigured landscape of power. But the significance of the newly fortified American border is also produced far beyond its territorial sites by a wide range of visual, performative and linguistic strategies that extend across the political spectrum. The range of media and communications exercises deployed to visualize the importance of the border has spanned reality TV shows, such as the National Geographic Channel’s Border Wars and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series The Border, to the Department of Homeland Security’s now defunct color-coded “security alert” chart, which attempted to visually stratify five levels of potential terrorist threats.7 Similarly the costly reconstruction of border stations to accommodate the prerogatives of the new “Smart Border accord” was launched through an architectural design competition and travelling exhibition, Thresholds Along the Frontier (2006). While this was a small nod to a large problem, this exhibition worked as a communications exercise to quell the increasing sense of public unease with the shift in border policy. International borders are often naturalized, as if set in place by some higher power. But as many critical geographers have noted, they are relatively recent concepts that are intimately linked to the rise of the nation state and its export through European colonial expansion.8 More recently, borders are in the process of being re-conceived and re-purposed to respond to the challenges brought on by globalization’s signature movements: increased migration, transnational capital, global terrorism and digital technology. The events of 9/11 indisputably changed the socalled borderless world promoted during the 1990s, but it is critical to note that such a fantasy was indeed short-lived, falling chronologically between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the attacks on the twin towers in 2001.9 The premise of the “world without borders” promoted during the 1990s has been followed by the re-conceptualization of borders as significant physical sites over the last decade, and the ways in which they are represented and symbolized are often contradictory.

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 5 The mixed messages generated about borders through the language of globalization, with its dynamic metaphors of speed, flow and uncertainty, compete with those of security mandates, which aim to codify and contain danger. These competing messages are contained within the multiple borders and checkpoints that exist not only between countries but also in the securitized landscape that permeates people’s movement within and between cities. Locative media and GPS technologies have further served to shift the status of cartography and to dismantle long-held presumptions about the relationship between territory maps and boundaries. This sea change in the way that we use and think about geography might seem out of step with increased fortification of physical borders that has been taking place around the world. Since 1989, over twenty thousand kilometers of new border walls and fences have been established and an additional eighteen thousand kilometers of security enhancements such as drones, radar and other modes of border surveillance have been installed.10 As maps, boundaries and borderlines are investigated and navigated in increasingly sophisticated ways, physical borders have become more subject to scrutiny and reinstated as significant markers of national identity. This gap between the ideals of mobility and flexibility as hallmarks of globalization, and the increased fortification of international boundaries is a noted paradox: it has frequently been observed that the security fence along the US–Mexico border is an ineffective answer to the security challenges that the US faces in the 21st century. The logic behind building impermeable boundaries at great cost is flawed and out of step with the nature of global terrorism. But, as Wendy Brown, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have variously noted, even the most threatening borders are serving to “regulate” rather than exclude immigrant labor.11 While the physical presence of borders is on the increase, their role is largely symbolic, Mezzadra and Neilson argue. In their estimation, contemporary borders test “the barrier between national sovereignty and more flexible forms of global governance in ways that provide a prism through which to track the transformations of capital.”12 In keeping with these recent studies of the role of borders within globalization, the emphasis here is specifically on the shifting concept of the American border and the geographic idea of North America more generally. National borders are not merely maintained by the mutual understanding of a geographic survey, or by the military presence of border patrol and border walls, however imposing. They also need to be sustained by a variety of methods that add dimension and give weight to a boundary survey by making the demarcation significant. This is especially the case for American territorial boundaries which have been in the midst of a crisis of meaning since the early 1990s. While 9/11 undoubtedly marked a turning point or a moment of intensification when the border was re-conceived as a vulnerable front in need of new walls, surveillance drones and vast

6

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line

border patrol forces, the significance of the territorial land borders has been growing since the establishment of the North American Free Trade Act in 1994 when tariff deregulation and the erasure of trade borders raised the specter of a common currency and other Eurozone-style arrangements. It was at this time that the political threat of an economically porous border began to undo the sleepy stasis of the old 19th-century lines. Peter Andreas argues that the border has been a political problem since the 1990s over a decade prior to 9/11 when NAFTA ushered in a series of “politically successful policy failures” to quell the anxieties of powerful anti-immigration groups in the American Southwest. The ineffectiveness of “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego and “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso, was evident in so far as it redirected migrant flows away from urban areas to more remote regions, where human- and drug-smuggling operations became more sophisticated and complex.13 While it is often said that borders have been thickened in North America, they have also been touted as an anxious marker of national identity within the lexicon of the American “homeland” that emerged after 2001.14 The technological reconstruction of American borders and their dispersion across multiple spaces corresponds with a declining concept of the American frontier in a global context as the US has shifted from expansionist to protectionist logic over the last two decades. Naming the continental US as a homeland has put increasing emphasis on its boundaries as the disjunction between home territory and foreign occupation forms a troubling conceptual gap that cannot be sustained. Borders have been reframed and re-invented as the sites that negotiate these anxieties, subsuming them under the sign of security itself. As a result, the unease surrounding the US–Mexico border has extended northward to encompass the Canadian border and into more nebulous territory as the US grapples with the conceptual contours of its own 21stcentury boundaries as delocalized, deterritorialized or even Möbius-like configurations. However, this book does not take the metageographical designation of North America as a given; rather, it suggests that the popular conceptions and official designations are at odds with each other. The North American metageographies envisioned through trade and security policy over the last two decades have renewed anxieties around the nation state. In this context, it is critical to question the role of the international boundaries between Canada, the United States and Mexico which have been ideologically refashioned through NAFTA and in the aftermath of 9/11, producing tensions that have reverberated well beyond the site of the border itself. Following Étienne Balibar’s insight that contemporary borders cease to be purely external or peripheral, the final chapters of this book take up the various ways that invisible borders become apparent in the alternative, imagined geographies of art and relational practices, indigenous struggles and environmental movements.

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 7 The book’s organization is conceptually arranged by a framework informed by Jacques Rancière’s distinction between the “aesthetics of politics” and the “politics of aesthetics,” which provides a theoretical basis to consider both the historical development of national borders in North America and more recent restructuring exercises of the last two decades. The first two sections examine visual claims to territory from maps to museological presentations. These case studies examine the role of vision and visuality within bordering processes as forms of governmentality and spatial management. The first section takes up the visual strategies that have created North American borders as a specific, naturalized “distribution of the sensible” that frames security policy. But this distribution is also subject to disruption through forms of dissensus which are explored through the final section of the book, where the focus is on an interpretation of borders and borderlands as various sites of conflict within North America.

Border as Consensus and Dissensus The US–Mexico border has developed as a fully securitized landscape in recent years. Before the 1990s this border was delineated by a series of boundary markers, checkpoints and chain-link fences in many respects differing little from the border of the 19th century. However, after the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, a hastily erected fence (the “tortilla” wall or curtain) was set up around urban checkpoints using corrugated steel panels during the Clinton administration. This fence has a storied history of military use: constructed from repurposed landing mats used during the First Gulf War it has also become the site for the world’s longest-running piece of detritus and remains intact even after the newer security wall was built in 2006–2008.15 This junkyard fence became the first scar on the landscape of the borderlands, standing as a testament to the shoddy architecture of NAFTA itself. This wall has also served as a stage of sorts. It has become a fundamental icon of injustice in the Americas, a blunt reminder of American geopolitics extending into Mexico and Central America, and a testament to the illconceived, patchwork nature of border interrelations. It serves to frame the American corporate addiction to cheap labor without the responsibility for basic accommodation for the people that provide it. The older “tortilla wall” has become the site for numerous murals and memorials that convey the tragedies of the US–Mexico borderlands, and the complex tales of the uneven, arrested development of Northern Mexico by transnational corporations. It is along this borderline that the conflicts and contradictions of global trade agreements play themselves out. The domino effect of late 20th-century trade deregulation and mass migrations in the Americas was hastened by a rapidly destabilized agricultural economy in Mexico and other parts of Central America. In the early 1990s, thousands of people

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Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line

from Mexico and Central America moved north to work in the expanding maquiladora complexes along the US border, in Tijuana, Juárez, Matamoros and other cities that were growing rapidly from the establishment of tariff-free export-processing zones that had been formed in the 1960s. But as transnational companies moved their operations to Asia in search of cheaper labor, many migrant workers arrived at the border to find that the employment situation was not as forecast. As the demand for undocumented labor in the US remains high, for those in search of employment the next step in the search for income was to cross into the US through the desert or other remote areas. Many have died in this process from heat exhaustion and dehydration.16 The tortilla wall has thus become an impromptu storyboard depicting a history of trans-American labor that is under erasure. From the hundreds of simple crosses made of scrap wood to the elaborate multi-panel murals by Taller Yonke in Nogales, Sonora, the tortilla curtain has become an important chronicle of a history of migration and death in the Americas. This older wall produces “a redistribution of the sensible” following Rancière, an example of dissensus that frames two opposing narratives of migration: one framed in the US as “illegal” and the other as a logical and legitimate means of survival. The tortilla wall stands in contrast to the larger more foreboding security wall erected by the Department of Homeland Security in 2006 along the US–Mexico border. This has become an international icon, a testament to the failure of US immigration reform, American insularity and paranoia. It was built at a great economic, environmental and social cost, but has had little to no impact in deterring migration or smuggling from the south, or softening the threat of terrorism from other parts of the world.17 However, it is an effective image, one that provides the illusion of safety for some while eliciting outrage and shame for many more. The security fence makes the US–Mexico border painfully visible in ways that it was not previously, working to project an image of power and control. Wendy Brown argues that these new security walls are more theatrical than military and that the recent international trend toward building border walls is a sign of “waning sovereignty” or the detachment of sovereignty from the nation state within a globalized world.18 Following Brown, I argue further that walls and other images of security that we have seen emerging over the last decade in the US might also be understood in terms of “consensus,” a word that Jacques Rancière employs rather atypically, to describe the formation of state power maintained by a police order. Consensus, according to Rancière, papers over dissent; it is the proverbial fig leaf of democracy that works by creating a “topography of the visual” to frame and shape a common political stage.19 Much has been written about the border as a shifting geographic and political concept or an economic hurdle to globalization.20 But rarely has the concept of the border been considered in terms of its aesthetics.

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 9 However, looking at the border through an aesthetic lens requires qualification: not to consider the border as a “work of art” in the teleological, nihilistic sense that Karlheinz Stockhausen evoked when he referred to the events of 9/11 as the “greatest work of art,” nor as something that might be plainly called “border art.” Rather, I am taking up aesthetics in the sense put forward by Rancière whose insistence on the “politics of aesthetics” works to unseat the traditional distinction between the two spheres as mutually exclusive domains. Rancière’s reorientation of the terms of aesthetics and politics is especially useful in rethinking the insurmountable issues that fall under the sign of the border. His articulation of the “distribution of the sensible,” what can be heard, seen or said, and by contrast what lies mute and invisible outside this distribution, offers a means to reconsider the multiple ways that the border has functioned to shape an imposed order of territory and national identity as well as sovereignty and citizenship. To say that the border has become a distribution of the sensible seems both self-evident and mundane. But it is also to draw out the aesthetic and ontological dimensions of a concept that appears as an incontestable artifact of political history. The borderline itself orders and perceptually arranges the “properties—resemblances and differences”21 of either side through the act of division. In looking to the contemporary border, there is a play between visibility and invisibility that is critical to the making of a national security state. On the one hand, the border has left a violent scar across vast sections of the American South and Mexico’s North, cutting through and disrupting unique landscapes and ecosystems, dividing families, communities and tribes. While on the other hand, the border also functions as an extended network of control that bleeds geographically beyond territorial boundaries to encompass interior checkpoints, crossborder drone surveillance as well as privately run detention centers set up in remote rural areas of the American Southwest. The borderline creates a specific distribution of the sensible (a here and there, a them and us) that must be seen and commonly understood in order to be effective. While the state sponsored the 19th-century surveys, the perception and understanding of the borderline’s effects did not take place immediately or evenly, building only through specific moments of crisis over the last century and a half as seen through immigration, labor or trade issues. These crises were frequently followed by institutional change. The first half of the book, Chapters 1 through 4, are concerned with the role of the image in governing the border as a form of consensus. The first two chapters establish a reading of the border as a distribution of the sensible, pointing to a range of visual strategies that have created North American borders as both nationalized and naturalized, framing their historical development and contemporary security policy. The creation and maintenance of the border itself operates as a form of police that enables certain forms of circulation while denying others; politics (as art or protest)

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ruptures this distribution of the sensible established through the police order and denies the presumed factuality of the border’s symbolism and meaning. The second half, Chapters 5 through 7, position Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics within contemporary practices of relational art and activism that reposition the logic of the border as sites of “dissensus.” In reframing the operations of power and opposition that produce contemporary borders in North America, I hope to ground Rancière’s ideas of politics as “dissensus.” Dissensus is not merely a conflict of opinion but rather demonstrates “a gap in the sensible itself.”22 Thus, for Rancière, politics emerges through the aesthetic. At risk of oversimplifying Rancière’s writings, many of which are framed in light of contemporary issues in France, these polarities of consensus and dissensus serve as a means to reconceive contemporary debates about borders in North America. The political philosopher, Todd May, writes that “politics is always irreducibly aesthetic; it creates something that did not exist before.”23 This is where various practices that fall under the guise of art, activism and resistance might be re-framed as dissensus to challenge the intractability of social issues that have proliferated in and around the border and to consider how new forms of community and citizenship are being created in spite of the increasing division of North America.

The Frontier Imagination In order to understand why the border has become a critical trope for the 21st century, I return to the shop-worn metaphor of the frontier to tease out the value system that informs contemporary security politics. The idea of the frontier is a recurrent motif throughout this book, and I regard it as a form of cultural nostalgia in the way that Svetlana Boym has linked “restorative nostalgia” to anxious narratives of nationality. While Boym suggests that American cultural history is anti-nostalgic in its bid to look forward and distinguish itself from the baggage of European “customs and names,” I argue that the frontier functions as a series of 20th- and 21stcentury returns that work to re-inscribe a founding national mythology. Restorative nostalgia, according to Boym is intimately linked to the idea of a homeland, one that is “forever under siege, requiring defense of the plotting enemy.”24 Amy Kaplan has gone further in considering the appeal to nostalgia found in contemporary security policy, noting the relatively recent adoption of the term homeland in the Department of Homeland Security, the signature institution established in 2002.25 She notes that at no point in American history has the term been used to refer to national identity, and its recent incarnation works to kindle desire for an idea of territorial belonging that has only been fashioned retroactively. Kaplan’s analysis of the unprecedented language established under the Bush administration points to the importance of imaginary affiliations in crafting security discourse. The nostalgic impulses of the homeland work in tandem

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 11 with both the idea of the border and the frontier. While American borders have been defined and established for over a century, the idea of the frontier has underwritten the border’s meaning both historically and in the contemporary moment, ideas that are explored through popular culture and television in Chapter 2. Each chapter takes up a different iteration of the relationship between the idea of the border and that of the frontier. In this regard, the book does not engage in a search to retrieve an original or celebratory notion of the frontier that informs contemporary bordering practices, but rather in how the frontier functions as a concept that is governed by Western conventions of visuality. The frontier initially functioned as an imaginary westward sightline set in motion by a longstanding European colonial desire embedded in the concept of manifest destiny. The idea of the frontier was therefore imagined before it was imaged through the border surveys and other landscape images, and it is intimately linked to colonial violence. The frontier’s relationship to themes of violence and conquest were ingrained in the 19th-century narrative accounts of the border surveys, and the first chapter outlines how the early landscape images of the surveys worked as part of an acquisitive process. While boundary demarcation is thought to remove political uncertainty, I draw out the moments of ambivalence in the surveys that signaled the ways in which violence remained as an implicit part of that process. “The Territorial Imagination” is the first part of the book and it opens up the relationship between the idea of the frontier and that of territory as colonial and imperial processes. Chapters in this part investigate the conceptual distinctions between the frontier as a founding ideal of American national consciousness and as a resonant concept in contemporary American culture at work in the rebordering of North America. Although the idea of the frontier is ubiquitous in popular culture, it is an essential concept to reconsider in the context of contemporary border studies. Looking back to the relationship between land, landscape and territory that was drawn in the 19th-century creation of the northern and southern land borders of the United States, I argue, that while the establishment of the border brought closure to the frontier as a physical zone, the concept can be traced throughout the historical development of North American borders. This is the case from its institutionalization in the early part of the 20th century to its technological and globalized variants in the early 21st century. While the concept of the frontier is overdetermined in the popular historical record and endlessly remade as a cultural fetish, the study of the frontier as a theoretical idea has been much more limited. The first three chapters trace this concept and its relationship to bordering in both popular and technological contexts as well as through different historical periods. While borders and frontiers are closely intertwined concepts they serve diverse purposes. Borders are commonly experienced as static entities, but they are continually in process, their power and authority undermined by

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physical and social movements, ecological shifts and migratory processes. Frontiers are linked to expansion and acquisition. In North America the dividing lines between Mexico, the United States and Canada were established by a series of 19th-century territorial wars between colonial powers. Inscribed in the founding narratives of nationhood in the US and Canada, the War of 1812 and the US–Mexican War preceded a series of 19th-century treaties, land purchases and boundary surveys. This political history has become a commonplace assumption, and questions around the historical violence of the border in North America have been silenced in the panic around security and fortification. While the geographical boundaries between these three countries are not contested, the concept of the border has been challenged on a variety of fronts in the last two decades, and these challenges have marked North American interrelations in spite of the longstanding peace between Mexico, the United States and Canada. This historical backdrop bears little relation to the scale and magnitude of recent border policy in the US, which was hastily conceived through the PATRIOT Act (2001) and institutionalized through establishment of the Department of Homeland Security the following year. “Mobile Frontiers” follows as the second part of the book and investigates ways in which the 19th-century notion of the frontier was extended in the 20th and 21st centuries to geographic locations other than the American West. Beginning with the 2006 exhibition Thresholds along the Frontier: Contemporary Border Stations, Chapter 3 examines the various ways in which American borders have been framed as museological projects. The Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas and the Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin are two private institutions that frame competing ideas about Western borders as frontiers and mark the distance between the celebratory moment of un-bordering in 1989 and their re-making after 2001. I examine how architecture and artifacts have been curated to naturalize the ideological presumptions behind building and dismantling borders and how these ideas have been played out within narratives of globalization over the past two decades. As abstract, conceptual phenomena geographical borders pose a representational quandary that is addressed not only through what has been conventionally called “hard power” (state strategies of demarcation and surveillance) but also through “soft power” and “imagined communities.”26 The strategies of architectural and museological display work to bolster popular support for, and lend meaning to, the abstraction of a line. These ideas are pushed further in considering Jacques Rancière’s idea of consensus, which he argues is not something that is arrived at democratically, but rather through the “visibility of the common” that is framed by objectifying situations so that they are no longer open for discussion. Taken together, these exhibitions display the uneasy status of the idea of frontier in the 21st century as a nostalgic trope that works to naturalize and justify new paradigms of border management.

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 13 Chapter 4, “Canada as the Borderline Case: ‘Outer America’ and the Northern Frontier” begins with Marshall McLuhan’s late 20th-century observation of Canada’s frontier condition and its cultural and political relationship to the United States. Canada’s border with the US has a longstanding metaphorical resonance in Canadian culture. This critical reading, stemming from Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, takes into account the self-reflexivity of the Canadian situation, caught linguistically between English and French, suspended temporally between British and American Empires, and politically between the historical agendas of settler colonialism and contemporary decolonial struggles. If a singular identity emerged from this, it is one shot through with post-national questioning, a knowing and sometimes cynical relationship to identity and territory that was at the forefront of debates on hybridity that flourished in the 1990s and have fallen off the radar in the wake of 9/11 in the midst of the ongoing redefinition of terror. However, the centrality of these ideas has shifted as the border’s physical presence has been extended through surveillance structures and media coverage. The chapter therefore looks to the relationship between North America’s other northern borders and boundaries: specifically First Nations’ territorial boundaries and spatial horizons in North America that challenge national, state and provincial jurisdiction. Ideas of the North have been particularly mired in concepts of Canadian identity and have framed the canon of Canadian culture in the 20th century, presenting a highly selective picture of the role of First Nations within the creation of Canada’s image, both domestically and internationally. More recently the image of the North has again become central to Canadian identity as climate change blurs the boundaries between interior and international waters and as global resource depletion puts increasing pressure on Arctic states to claim territory in the name of global security, shipping operations and resource extraction. In Canada, the Inuit are called upon as guarantors of Canadian sovereignty in the North and their representational status as a central part of Canadian identity has been showcased in the creation of the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut in 1999, as well as in the recent promotion of the Canadian Rangers as a predominantly Inuit, Dene and Métis volunteer force established to patrol remote regions of the Canadian North. This chapter investigates the ways in which representations of the North in Canada have shifted over the last decade as geopolitical imperatives to claim the Arctic as Canadian territory have played out on a global stage. The final part of the book “Modalities of Dissensus” considers shifting notions of site in relation to the US border. Here, the border becomes both the locus of contestation to expose state practices of exclusion as well as a site of experimentation for alternative modes of mapping, exchange, community and citizenship. The art and media events that I discuss in this section reorient the conventions of geography. The works discussed in the final section serve to bracket out the border by denaturalizing the way that

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we understand territory and geography. The practices discussed in this section trade in a dialogue that falls under the name of “experimental geography,” a broad shift in the relationship between art and geography that has been developing over the last fifty years. Trevor Paglen coined the term to suggest the multitude of ways that geography has become unmoored from its disciplinary boundaries. Art began to overlap geography, according to Paglen, around the same time that geography began to lose its status in universities as an autonomous discipline, after World War II. At the same time, geography came to occupy a critical place within experimental modes of art: most famously in post-war France as the Situationist International mined the language of geography and cartography to form psychogeographic practices that offered escape routes from the routines of capitalist labor and circuits of consumerist desire.27 These broad movements have more recently coalesced with the widespread use of GPS technologies serving to shift the status of cartography and to dismantle modern presumptions about the relationship between territory and maps. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 look at contemporary notions of site, citizenship and community in relationship to the border’s extended geographies through taking up Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus. This concept repositions the conventional relationship between aesthetics and politics, and I use it as a theoretical framework to unpack the ways in which the border is an aesthetic construction or a “distribution of the sensible” that naturalizes the way we have come to understand bordering as a process and as a condition. Dissensus is at work when these arrangements are disrupted and when we can see two contradictory worlds in one, when “a gap in the sensible” becomes available for us to see.28 The art and media projects taken up in this section ask essential questions about what borders do, what they conceal as well as reveal. From Dylan Miner’s “illegitimate border” that runs through the Great Lakes, to Teddy Cruz’s “political equator” projects, these new modalities of dissensus work to unseat the US–Canada border or the US–Mexico border as nationalized political constructions. The final section is less about Canadian, Mexican or American art than the myriad attempts to defy nationalist geography and to bring questions of cultural production in line with the kinds of transnational movements that have been shifting the concept of North America, a region in continual negotiation that seems to be resistant to a continental identity. This is not pro-NAFTA, but it does recognize that these economic imperatives have rapidly rearranged the continental ideal of North America in ways that are in conflict with both historical and cultural patterns of settlement and migration in the Americas as well as indigenous concepts of land. Chapter 5 looks to art and media projects of the last decade that have launched critiques of border control through tracking networks of transnational circulation in North America. From Ricardo Dominguez’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that distributed a GPS cell phone

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 15 app to migrants to help navigate the hostile cross-border territory of the Sonoran Desert, to the coordinated efforts of the 2013 Idle No More protests that temporarily shut down parts of the Canada–US border, there has been a circulatory turn of contemporary practices that challenge the partitioning and control of territory in North America as a hemispheric region. These projects variously employ a range of strategies from tactical media to archeological techniques to demonstrate that people and things continue to move across heavily monitored borders, however imposing and inhumane they have become. In tracing movement across various border zones and throughout North America, the projects discussed in this chapter call attention to the social, environmental and economic forms of circulation that converge at the site of the border. The critical touchstones of liminality from the 1990s, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” or the fractured “border thinking” of Walter Mignolo, are reconsidered in Chapter 6 in terms of recent conversations on politics, aesthetics and democracy. This chapter covers the changing discourse about the border as a specific site over the last two decades and the various forms of translocal resistance, exchange and dialogue that have emerged in response to increased regulation and control after NAFTA (1994), and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (2002). Étienne Balibar’s reflections on citizenship and alterity produced by the friction of the border, as well as Rancière’s challenge to conventions of political discourse are brought to bear on the various sites and subjects produced by the border through relational art and activism. Finally, Chapter 7 takes up the idea of a frontier metropolis to consider a series of juxtapositions between the Detroit–Windsor border and cities on the US–Mexico border. While Detroit is rarely regarded as a border city, its history as a 17th-century military outpost and its eventual location on the Canadian border have made it a frontier of sorts. In addition to the economic crises that have plagued the city, Detroit also struggles with a growing border security complex and industrial, transborder pollution. These border-related problems suggest similarities to cities along the US–Mexico border. Detroit initially presents a study in contrast with its southern counterparts: large parts of the city remain emptied out in sharp distinction to the hyper-populated and precarious colonias of Tijuana and Juárez. But urban poverty and lack of access to municipal services have led to alternative economies and transborder networks that reactivate its frontier identity once more. Similarly, translocal communication strategies such as billboards and temporary projections serve to override the divisions produced by the Canada–US border.

Peripheral Perspectives on Border Studies While I look to shifting representations of both the Canada–US border and the Mexico–US border, the book is not structured by comparative

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case studies of both borders in equal measure as there is significant disparity between the historical and cultural politics of these two sites. Rather than looking at the Canada–US border and the Mexico–US border as two discrete lines that demarcate three national spaces, I emphasize an ethos of Anglo-American bordering practices that were developed through colonial expansion, refined through the multiple surveys in the late 19th century and the emergent surveillance practices in the early 20th century. These surveys begin as bilateral projects between young nations (Mexico and the US or Canada/British Empire–US), therefore reflecting colonial rivalries, and divergent patterns of settler colonialism (American, Canadian and British) or the extractive colonialism of the Spanish.29 However, these practices become distinctly part of a military-industrial complex by the end of the 20th century, increasingly refined during the security era that we have now entered. The comparative North American framework therefore emerges from the fact that both Mexico and Canada share long land borders with the US. This does not make them parallel or equal situations except that Canada and Mexico share a set of bordered political conditions with the US that could be characterized as reactive rather than shared or collaborative. The US acts for the most part unilaterally while Canada and Mexico respond in different, yet limited ways to the geopolitical conditions they inhabit. This is a familiar history from NAFTA’s inception to the post-9/11 world. But this condition can also be read in some of the early 19th-century border negotiations drawn out in Chapter 1. While much of this book is invested in the ways in which the border has created unique cultural micro-climates in Canada, the US and Mexico, specifically the ways in which these boundaries produce local subversions and resistances, it is necessary to recognize that the border is first a differential product of American power that both Canada and Mexico respond to in turn. The received images of the border are primarily dictated by the American political imaginary in the form of security discourse and policy, and presented as irrefutable fact in the guise of “common sense.” While I am critical of US security discourse, I also want to stress that I am equally suspicious of the kind of exclusionary, copycat nationalism that has emerged in both Canada and Mexico particularly around appeals to terrorism that replicate states of insecurity and the “police order” that Rancière names in consensus. It is also critical to stress that these increasingly patrolled and fortified borders are not recognized by many people who live in North America, a continent and concept itself invented by European colonization.30 The book aims to unpack the homologous relationship between border/order to deconstruct how borders work as epistemological tools for producing specific forms of knowledge, power and classification to override the alterity of indigeneity as well as the hybridity of the borderlands. I argue that the 19th-century boundary surveys served not only to define territorial possessions of the US, Mexico and Canada, but also as one of the most

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 17 dramatic acts of colonization over indigenous populations in North America. These surveys were instruments that brought about increasingly controlled sites that produced national space by subsuming and dividing indigenous peoples. Thus, Gloria Anzaldúa’s powerful characterization of the US–Mexico border as “una herida abierta,” positions the Americas implicitly from an indigenous perspective as a single, wounded body that bleeds. The extent to which Anzaldúa’s work can travel outside the US–Mexico borderlands, its place and context of origin, is a question that has been raised by a number of scholars interested in comparative border studies. In this regard, First Nations/Native American artists and theorists have the most to offer in a comparative perspective, especially as increased border patrol has had profound implications for indigenous people living on or near one of the two land borders. The surveillance and patrol of the borderlands directly contravenes indigenous relationships to land and waterways, as well as rituals of travel and exchange that remain distinct from Western conventions of geography and territory. Dylan Miner’s brilliant reading of “la (otra) frontera” in Southwest Detroit deliberately pulls Anzaldúa’s Aztlán toward the northern edge of Detroit on the Canadian border, where a longstanding Mexican community has lived since the early part of the 20th century. Miner interweaves histories of migrant labor to Michigan in terms of a “MiChicana/o” experience that is equally accentuated by an “alterNative” understanding of the borderlands.31 Miner’s take on mestizaje is one that not only displaces our understanding of the borderlands from the region of the Mexico–US border but his work also reminds us of the indigenous presence in reconnecting métissage and mestizaje in the Great Lakes region. Conceptual and theoretical displacements like this are critical to a comparative borderlands perspective. Albert Braz reads Canada’s position in hemispheric studies as “Outer America” decentring the whiteness of traditional Canadian studies by focusing on the Métis as an important component of racial hybridity in Canadian cultural identity. Braz notes that, in general, “Canada’s engagement within the Americas is so peripheral that no one in Canada appears to have noticed the development.” Both Miner and Braz point to the gaps between border studies and indigenous readings of the troubled concept of North America, a concept which according to Braz is deeply Americanized: “Mexico is absorbed into the Latin American world. Canada, in contrast, is driven off the map.”32 Alternatively, Rachel Adams notes that the post-war development of area studies tended to present North America as a unified whole separate from its southern neighbor in order to classify areas of strategic interest to the United States during the Cold War. Adams also notes that NAFTA was a “watershed moment in the invention of North America,” which speaks volumes to the tenor and development of comparative border studies between the two borders and three countries.

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In short, North America is a place that few would call home, a concept that is more the invention of politicians and economists than the product of its inhabitants’ collective imagination. History tells us that the rhetoric of continentalism has long been deployed to serve U.S. national imperatives ranging from territorial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries to the economic dominance and national security in the 20th and 21st.33 In many respects the field of border studies in North America has inherited these geographical conceits. What Walter Mignolo had positioned as “border thinking” in the 1990s, as a peripheral and decolonial critique of modernity and its epistemologies has now been advanced as a project investigating the potential for decolonial aesthetics.34 Yet Mignolo too has inherited a similar blindness toward North America as a site for decolonial thought, focusing instead on center–periphery dichotomies between Latin America, Africa and Asia and the Anglo-European worlds of North America and Europe. Looking Beyond Borderlines, therefore situates the trope of the frontier as the epistemological and aesthetic project that remains unfinished in the idea of North America, particularly as neoliberal and security discourse has defined borders as instrumental to the management of market economies. But, more importantly, the artists and theorists taken up here, suggest how we might look beyond the border as a defining political and geographic entity toward communities, ecologies and ways of being that elude the logic of bordering and states of insecurity.

Notes 1 Jason Ackleson, “Border Security in Risk Society,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, 20: 1 (2005): 1–22, 3. 2 David Campbell and Michael Shapiro, guest editors’ Introduction to “Special Issue on Securitization, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post9/11,” Security Dialogue, 38: 2 (2007): 131–137, 132. 3 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 4 Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in David Lyon (Ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (Uffculme: Willan, 2006), 46–68, 46. 5 Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review, 85 (2003): 82–93, 89. 6 Andrew Rice, “Life on the Line between El Paso and Juarez,” New York Times, July 28, 2011, 4. 7 John Paul and Sangyoub Park, “With the Best of Intentions: The Color Coded Homeland Security Advisory System and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” Research and Practice in Social Sciences, 4: 2 (2009): 1–13, 7. 8 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 9 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 139.

Introduction: Sight and Site on the Line 19 10 Élisabeth Vallet, Introduction: “The (Re)Building of the Wall in International Relations,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, 27: 2 (2012), 111–119, 113. DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2012.687211 11 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 16; and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, Or, The Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 8. 12 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 8. 13 Peter Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders: The US–Canada and the US–Mexico Lines After 9/11,” in Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (Eds.), The Rebordering of North America (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 14 Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 86. 15 Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the US–Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 16. 16 Josiah Heyman, “Illegality and the US–Mexico Border: How it is Produced and Resisted,” in Cecilia Menjivar and Daniel Kanstroom (Eds.), Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences and Responses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 111–135, 112. 17 Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders,” 5. 18 Brown, Walled States, 24. 19 Jacques Rancière, Chronicles of Consensual Times, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), xi. 20 David Newman, “Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies: An Overview,” in Doris Wastl-Walter (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33–49, 34. 21 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 92. 22 Rancière, Chronicles, 38. 23 Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 115. 24 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 43. 25 Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 86. 26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6; Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2011), xii. 27 Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography,” in Nato Thompson (Ed.), Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009), 10. 28 Rancière, Dissensus, 37. 29 Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, “Indigeneity and Transnational Routes and Roads in North America,” in Julián Castro-Rea (Ed.), Our North America: Social and Political Issues Beyond NAFTA (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 27–45, 30. 30 Edmundo O’Gorman, The invention of America: An Inquiry into the historical nature of the New World and the meaning of its history (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 7. 31 Dylan Miner, “Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 33: 1 (2008), 102–112, 109.

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32 Albert Braz, “Outer America: Racial Hybridity and Canada’s Peripheral Place in Inter-American Discourse,” in Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel (Eds.), Canada and its Americas: Transnational Navigations (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 119–134, 122. 33 Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17. 34 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Part I

The Territorial Imagination

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1

Framing the Frontier From Survey to Surveillance

Violence is the standard operating procedure of visuality. Nicholas Mirzoeff1 The Frontier as we think of it today owes much to that representation of a territory that is a map. Claude Raffestin2

Much of the border between Canada and the United States traverses dense forest. A six-meter clear-cut marks the international boundary through this territory, one that needs continual maintenance as a large-scale landscaping project to keep the borderline visible. This Sisyphean task has been performed twice yearly since 1925. In aerial views, the deforested strip resembles an earthwork from the 1960s, an aesthetic statement about the spatial production of landscape rather than the mundane, ongoing groundwork of the International Boundary Commission. Earthworks were named as such in the 1960s when the American artist Robert Smithson attempted to define an emerging form of land-based art, one that spoke to the conceit of human endeavor in the face of the entropic forces of nature, physical change and transformation. Earthworks were monumental statements that juxtaposed art’s temporary and ephemeral qualities against our desire for permanence and certainty. North American borders share in this seemingly futile game of will, temporarily manipulating the landscape in order to partition, control and define a physical boundary that is continually erased by the region’s dominant ecosystems. But the line through the forest that forms the Canada–US border appears like an earthwork through its conceptual simplicity and scale as well as the way it changes our perception of the landscape. That a political construction resembles a work of art speaks more to the idea of a border as a kind of representational scheme, rather than art’s ability to depict political affairs. While the International Boundary Commission’s reproduction of the border is a mundane maintenance procedure, it can also be read as performative process reduplicating the borderline as a gesture

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that serves theatrical ends more than immediate security or military purposes. Rob Shields has stressed that borders are virtual interfaces that are actualized through “embodied behaviors and concrete objects.” He describes the habitual routines of boundary drawing or the soft operational culture of a border as the “real meat” of this subject rather than “the concrete exoskeleton of gates, fences, signage or border posts.”3 But these performative processes are often overlooked in contemporary political discourse on borders where the line itself is regarded as an intransigent fact. A direct connection between earthworks and border landscapes was first drawn by Dennis Oppenheim in 1968 when he produced Annual Rings, a temporary work cut through the snow-covered ice on the St. John River that divides the state of Maine from the neighboring province of New Brunswick along the Canada–US border (Figure 1.1). Oppenheim’s transitory gesture bracketed the boundary and marked the flowing, invisible border between two sovereign territories. The work appeared as a series of empty brackets, the river’s current cutting through ice at the center where the borderline runs. These dissected rings drew attention to the zone where the ice became thin and dangerous, where the solid edge gave way to frigid water and a strong current. The Canada–US border,

Figure 1.1 Annual Rings, Dennis Oppenheim, 1968, USA–Canada boundary at Fort Kent, Maine and Clair, New Brunswick. 150 ⫻ 200. Schemata of annual rings severed by political boundary. Time: USA 1:30 p.m. Time: Canada 2:30 p.m. (photo: Dennis Oppenheim Estate)

Framing the Frontier 25 known as the world’s “longest undefended boundary” since Winston Churchill’s proclamation in 1939, was provisionally framed in 1969 as a zone of instability or insecurity. In keeping with the tenor of the late 1960s and the post-minimalist emphasis on duration, Oppenheim stressed the international border’s role in dividing time, rather than territory as Annual Rings also marks the line between Central and Eastern time zones. But the work has come to stand as a metaphor for this northern borderline’s ephemeral and transitory nature, qualities that have been frequently noted by critical observers of borderlands history. This work is unusual and stands apart from what is often called “border art”: it emphasizes the invisibility and precarity of the physical line of the border rather than its capacity to violently divide territory and to separate people in ways we have become accustomed to seeing along the US–Mexico border and other border zones around the world. This difference is not merely a product of its cultural location (a remote section of the Canada–US border versus the highly trafficked urban corridors of the US–Mexico border where most cultural production happens) nor is it simply of a different era. Annual Rings demonstrates the border’s vulnerability rather than pointing to it as a kind of permanent political fixture. It presents the borderline itself as a void: flowing, uncertain and, through its association with the half-frozen river, a portent of the insecurity that underwrites the fortification of contemporary borders. Oppenheim’s work also marks the site of one of the first international boundary disputes on the US–Canada border, the short-lived Aroostook War (1838–1839) which worked to settle the undefined watershed between northern Maine and New Brunswick, between American and British lands when the Jay Treaty of 1794 proved sufficiently vague in this remote region of the northern frontier. I begin with Oppenheim’s project as it points to the ambiguity at play in the process of bordering as well the border’s integral connection to landscape convention. In the 19th century, North American borders were defined through astronomical and territorial observation that confirmed what political treaties outlined in written documents and maps. The scientific and textual observations of the surveys, however, were confirmed through landscape views: topographical illustrations and photographs that verified the locations of the boundary markers, which were frequently damaged or displaced.4 The process of boundary demarcation worked to mask uncertainty about the status and permanence of the border. While obelisks of marble and cement eventually replaced the first stone cairns and earth mounds along the borderline, the framing of the landscape view served to record and verify the official survey process. This chapter asks how we might see the relationship between the more elusive and imaginary construction of the frontier and that of the physical border during its initial surveys and as it has subsequently informed the institutionalization of the border at transitional moments.

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The images produced by the various 19th-century boundary commissions, those established between Mexico–US and Canada–US, were products of governmentality, aspiring to accurately visualize and map newly acquired territories within a science of nation building. But the landscape images produced for the surveys were not straightforward depictions of topography. Whether illustration or photograph, they provided a great deal of commentary in their details: some was slyly intended, but often these images functioned like historical margin notes, providing insight into contemporary bordering processes. However, I hope to move beyond reading these images simply as a harbinger of current political tensions. Rather they serve as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and politics as co-present in the historical establishment and contemporary maintenance of borders in North America. This requires a slight change in perspective following what Jacques Rancière reads as the aesthetics of politics, which places sensory perception at the heart of politics rather than coming after as a reflection on political matters. Reading these landscape images in this way is to reopen the border as uncertain territory, suggesting that bordering is never a final act but one that produces a remainder or excess that cannot be represented by drawn lines. Social historians of art have long regarded landscape convention in terms of its highly selective and imaginative framing, its presentation of privileged vantage points and the cultural ambiguity that is masked through the process. Along these lines, W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that landscape is “the dreamwork of nationalism,” bound up with discourses of imperialism. Reading landscape as a medium of social and political expression rather than a genre of art, Mitchell notes that the grammar and logic of landscape emerged most forcefully in the 19th century as imperialism was at its height.5 Mitchell also implicates landscape in the acquisition and conquest of space linking it to temporal conventions of civilization and progress: the “prospect” opened up through landscape “is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of development and exploitation.”6 This ambivalence detected at the heart of landscape representation is clearly evident in the 19th-century images of the North American boundary surveys. While these images were ostensibly rendered as topographic documents to identify and fix the boundaries of the US, Mexico and Canada they also betray unresolved tensions around how to frame national territory and the role of natural history within this frame. This was an acquisitive natural history that took stock of rocks, plants and indigenous people on the same archival register. In the three-volume Report of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (1857–59), the landscape views were accompanied by ethnographic, botanical and geological studies which included their own detailed illustrations in separate volumes. And although the border surveys signaled political resolution, with different

Framing the Frontier 27 implications for the three countries involved, they also displaced the frontier as a physical zone and troubled the ideals of expansion that came with it. The survey reports produced contradictions between the written reflections on the physical process and the views offered through the landscape representations. Through these sets of images it is possible to read the unresolved political tensions of the surveys: from the commission’s encounters with the various indigenous peoples who inhabited the lands they sought to control, to the acquisitive desire to keep the line as an advancing frontier, one that could potentially extend beyond the limits that were then being surveyed. The English invented the aesthetic conventions of picturesque and sublime landscapes to guide nationalist sentiment through the enclosure movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. The partitioning of territory across North America similarly drew on these conventions to inscribe Anglo-European sensibilities onto newly colonized lands. This was as legible in the paintings of the Hudson River School as it was in the scientific reports of the Mexico–US and Canada–US Boundary Surveys, and although these pictorial conventions were generated through painting, the uncertain status of the bordered landscape carried through even as photography became the documentary medium of choice in the late 19th century. In looking to these early images of the border, I stress the interplay between the Romantic ideology of the frontier (a concept that flourished retroactively at the end of the 19th century) and the scientific and economic quest to claim territory through the surveying, ordering and bordering of national space in North America. Here borders and frontiers have informed one another as an interdependent pair: while the frontier and the border are often juxtaposed as discrete stages in the historical development of the US, Canada and Mexico their definitions and representations converge and overlap both historically and in contemporary situations. The ideology of the frontier has been written into the colonization of the west, but it also informs the representation of the border from the surveys of the 19th century to the contemporary surveillance image produced through recent securitization measures, as I discuss in subsequent chapters. The 19th-century survey reports are complex documents that employed various types of landscape image to claim territory prior to the full completion of a nationalized map. In this both border surveys occupy an awkward place as historical documents, as they signal a transitional and exploratory moment rather than a completed or authoritative image of the nation state. As ubiquitous as the frontier is in 20th-century popular culture, the investigation of the concept is critical within the context of contemporary border studies in order to re-examine the link between land, landscape and territory in the 19th century during the creation of the northern and southern land borders of the United States. Although the establishment of the border brought closure to the frontier as a physical

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zone, the concept can be traced throughout the history of North American borders, from its institutionalization in the early part of the 20th century to its technological and globalized variants in the early 21st century. While the concept of the frontier is overdetermined in the popular historical record and endlessly remade as a cultural fetish, the study of the frontier as a theoretical idea has been much more limited. Claude Raffestin connects the act of drawing limits to a foundational religious act where the straight line constructs a moral order, and the highest authority is invested in the one who draws the line: “This tracing is done by the personage invested with the highest powers, the rex,” who is “not so much the sovereign as the one who draws the line.”7 This connection between a moral order and a governmental order continues as the nation state began defining limits as a foundational act after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.8 However, Raffestin conflates the terms border and frontier as the French term is the same for both. In the American context, the frontier takes on its own direction as a mobile limit that becomes independent of the border. The frontier’s investigation as a historical concept formed the basis of a more critical “new western history” from the 1970s onward, which in turn opened up the development of borderlands studies with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza turning the tables on the dominant logic of the frontier and its centrality in American culture. Since this time, the idea of the frontier has been rightfully questioned as a founding historical trope. Sheila McManus has aptly characterized the frontier and its “mythic baggage of white conquest and masculine political freedom” as dominant narrative in many historical studies of the west both in the US and Canada.9 However, these mythical ideas are still arguably a guiding force in contemporary North American culture from contemporary American militias to the Canadian Rangers, paramilitary groups discussed in subsequent chapters. There are multiple wests in North America informed by complex and hybrid histories. Chicano and indigenous perspectives have tempered the power of frontier mythology by giving greater resolution to the borderlands as richly heterogeneous places that challenge conventional national histories. These critical perspectives have shaped my understanding of the borderlands’ multiple sites which I engage throughout the book, but the immediate focus in this chapter is to open up this vague and perplexing idea of the frontier in order to understand how it has historically shaped the development of North American borders and also how it foreshadows the frontier’s various returns in the militarization and mediatization of the contemporary border. I read the frontier as a concept that is governed by Western conventions of visuality. Before manifest destiny became a political ideology, it was an imaginary westward sightline set in motion by a longstanding European colonial will.10 The frontier was therefore imagined before it was imaged.

Framing the Frontier 29 And though its associations change with time and place, the mid-19th century proved to be a high-water mark for the frontier as a specific “representation of space,” which following Henri Lefebvre is “frontal” and “coded,” oriented toward a particular program or plan.11 Lefebvre’s work positions the violence of abstract space as the formative space of capitalism and the surveys were the critical method employed to legitimate American and British programs of colonial expansion. Nicholas Mirzoeff similarly reminds us of the violence of visuality that was as central to colonial and imperial history as it is to contemporary military operations in the early 21st century, where the masked bodies of prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo remain just within the field of vision at the margins of media culture.12 In re-examining the idea of the frontier with its tropes of violence and conquest as a central part of the formation of North American borders, I want to suggest that far from achieving peace and resolution through drawing boundaries and establishing borders, that violence remains as an implicit part of that process. The violence of contemporary bordering practices have been drawn out by a number of artists and theorists, most notably Étienne Balibar, whose work I address more fully in Chapter 2. But the role of visuality within these bordering practices is overlooked and undertheorized. This can only take place when the conventional division between aesthetics and politics is left aside. Ariella Azoulay offers the observation that we have been paralyzed by a false dichotomy between what is understood as aesthetic and what is named as properly political, particularly in photography where the image is understood to function as testament. Azoulay refers to this as a polarized judgment of taste whose essence is often expressed in terms of images becoming “too aesthetic,” or alternately, “too political.”13 Like Azoulay, Jacques Rancière also has noted the operations of aesthetics in terms of what he has somewhat awkwardly named the “distribution of the sensible” where our ability to respond conforms to what can be “seen or heard.”14 Thus, the image of the border is both aesthetic as a “distribution of the sensible” as well as a political division.

The Vanishing Point of the Frontier: Drawing the United States–Mexico Boundary Falls of the Rio Salado by John E. Weyss is one of many color landscape illustrations accompanying Major William Emory’s Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (1857–1859). This is a fairly typical illustration from the report, but from a contemporary perspective the view presented of the US–Mexico borderlands seems radically strange. Framing the borderlands in terms of European landscape traditions, Falls of the Rio Salado is a formulaic image that mixes the picturesque calm of the English countryside with the sublime uncertainty of German Romanticism, notionally referenced in the figure of the wandering gentleman-explorer

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looking out over a shallow promontory (Figure 1.2). In Emory’s words, the Rio Salado was a “true oasis” of interest to the US boundary commission for its cypress groves and the promise of clear waters. In contrast, Emory described Rio Bravo (or Rio Grande as it is now known in the US) as tainted by banks of “rotten limestone” causing its tributaries to become “brackish and unwholesome.”15 A southern tributary of the Rio Bravo, which formed the eastern limit of American territory, the Rio Salado extends well into Mexican territory beyond the border, originating in the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains in the state of Coahuila. The attention paid to the view of this river suggests the unfinished business of the frontier, implied in the vanishing point of the image. While the US–Mexico boundary line was fixed on its eastern side down the deepest channel of the Rio Grande, the sightlines framed by the image extend indefinitely past the boundary line, south toward lands not yet annexed. Kris Fresonke connects the design of manifest destiny implicit in Major Emory’s writings to literary audiences in New England eager for a

Figure 1.2 Falls of the Rio Salado, John E. Weyss, 1859, from the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Made under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior William H. Emory, Major First Cavalry and United States Commissioner (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Framing the Frontier 31 redemptive and prophetic message to couple with the abstraction of the newly acquired territories: “Emory was not interested in the view from the southern side of the border; looking from the south toward El Norte was an unthinkable condition.”16 But the expansive southward views offered in the Report’s many landscape images confirm what could not be explicitly stated in the textual accounts. And though the survey implied the closure of the frontier through the establishment of the border, a restless and acquisitive gaze permeates the color plates that accompany the survey. The 1857 boundary survey report spans three volumes and has a complicated political history as the first survey to be brought to completion following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This was one of the most heavily illustrated government documents of the 19th century that included 64 landscape views of the territory under survey.17 Like Falls of the Rio Salado, most of the color plates in this report look south toward Mexico, suggesting the potential of that which lies beyond the official boundary line. By comparison, Emory’s narrative is filled with references to the indolence of “Indians” and “half-breeds” that the surveyors encountered, blaming the “barrenness” of the territory on the people of the borderlands.18 Emory’s writings were infused with a desire to correct and pastoralize the region. Seduced by the promises of manifest destiny, which was more an ideology than a political program at the time, Emory’s disdain toward both the terrain and the people he encountered was made clear in his written accounts. The accompanying landscape illustrations, however, suggest a simplified story and plainly convey a Romantic makeover of the region as an attempt to sell it to audiences in the east. As a result, the survey report fashions a grand narrative of the ruin of the Spanish empire and civilization: Emory veers between his contempt for the Mexican and indigenous peoples living in the borderlands and his future visions for vineyards and farmlands. The landscape views of the survey, however, convey a less complicated picture than that indicated by the text. Most are devoid of people, alternately presenting the desert territory as a blank slate or the river valleys as genteel, picturesque and untouched. Emory’s survey gives us a sense of what was at stake in the project to revision the frontier by demarcating the borderline in the 1850s. The survey was conducted immediately after the Gadsden Purchase, not even a decade after the end of the Mexican–American War and it drew specific sightlines to frame a field of vision that was directed and focused through the lens of industrial development. This survey was critical in the race to stake claims to a transcontinental rail line, precious metals and seaports. According to Alex Hunt, it “anticipates the troubled legacy of the region . . . and its ongoing history of environmental degradation, cultural division and political unrest.”19 The survey also had symbolic import in drawing closure to the issues behind the Mexican–American War, described by Fresonke as “America’s Agincourt,” a defining moment in the nation’s self image.20 In the US, the 1850s marked a decisive turning point that

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vindicated for Americans their annexation of Texas and justified the drive to take California. The 97 topographical boundary sketches, unlike the color lithographs discussed above, form an important supplement to the cartographic and ethnographic work of the survey.21 While these were done by a handful of military artists, Arthur Schott was considered the most experienced among them, devising a technique to represent the locations of the boundary markers by matching their location to the topography of the horizon. Schott’s comparatively sparse boundary views, unlike the color plates, look east and west along the line rather than directly south. His sketches illustrate the locations of the temporary markers—stone mounds and makeshift flagpoles—by marking the vanishing point with specific sightlines indicated by small radiating dots in the sky that appear as lone stars (Figure 1.3). Analyzing Schott’s sketches, Robert Kelsey notes that his pictorial strategy was one that produced indexical “vectors” to trace the geodetic coordinates of an imaginary line through a series of images that documented and fixed the territorial locations more permanently than the boundary markers ever could.22 These illustrations were some of the most critical tools in the survey and Emory published them in his first and most prized volume; it was also Schott’s work as a surveyor that brought him his primary income. As a botanist, however, Schott felt that his plant studies were of greater scientific value to the study of the west. As Emory regarded them of little importance, Schott often embellished the foreground of the boundary views with detailed sketches of cacti and agave to give his botanical observations immediate prominence in the first report.23 Kelsey notes that the sharp division between foreground and background produced in these boundary views resulted from the conflicting agendas between Schott and Emory. Schott’s attention to the foreground, coupled with Emory’s interest in the distant horizon left no middle ground and thus polarized the field of vision.24 The pictorial divide between near and far that occurs in Schott’s sketches suggests more than conflicting ideas between the artist-botanist and the military general however. The conceptual gulf implied in the pictorial technique of these boundary surveys—where there is no middle ground and no accommodation for the eye between here and there, between material and abstract space—makes evident a scopic regime that is as implicit to the conventions of map making as it is to the illusions of the frontier. As maps place both terra incognita and the new world on the far left of the pictorial space, it would naturally follow that the logic of the survey would advance from east to west.25 While the work of the survey took place in several segments originating on the Pacific coast and proceeding eastward, the report, in contrast, begins in the east at the lower Rio Bravo and its regional studies proceed westward as Emory’s narrative unfolds. Connecting the abstract movement of the travelling eye to the history of imaging technologies, Paul Virilio reads the concept of the frontier as an ever-advancing

Framing the Frontier 33

Figure 1.3 Arthur Schott, topographic sketch with cacti, 1859, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey

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imaginary horizon that draws the archetypal pioneer forward in time and space. The appetite for space that was born in the 15th century with the theoretical and practical applications of the vanishing point, Virilio argues, connects the ambitions inherent in the development of perspectival vision in Italy with forms of representation in American history. “Before eating up space with a voracity unique in the history of human migrations the pioneer eats it up with his eyes—in America everything begins and ends with the covetousness of the eyes.”26 The multitude of boundary sketches in the report visually stitch together the borderline as an imaginary construct, connecting the viewer to a series of astronomical points that are held together by a grand idea. The report, therefore, follows the more familiar narrative direction of manifest destiny and the conventional westward advance of the frontier, even though the survey was undertaken in sections from the western limit tracing its path back eastwards.27 Emory’s biases and racial slurs are not altogether unexpected, but the extent of creative post-production in this survey report is surprising for a man who had little time for extraneous detail and aesthetic matters. The pictorial arrangement of the borderline provided a critical lens to focus attention on a frontier region that was abstractly important but largely unintelligible to many Americans at the time. The series of images arranged in the report function much like a moving image avant la lettre, long before John Ford rolled across the west with his film crews. Arranged through the report, the borderline provided a line of sight that was animated by its westward trajectory, the vanishing point connecting the topographical series as a means of pulling a national historical consciousness along with it. The arrow of time that traverses Schott’s sketches runs east to west like the vanishing point of the frontier. The survey thus addressed a representational quandary implicit in the natural order of American history by creating space in its own image. It produced the border as a line of control to rein in the frontier as a mobile zone of uncertainty lending moral weight to its presence. The survey report suggests that the border was drawn in a dynamic westward motion paradoxically rendering the expansive qualities of the frontier within the border’s field of operations. The image of the fixed territorial line provided assurance for greater possibilities of acquisition and control. While images of the Mexico–US boundary survey include the native peoples of the borderlands, they are interspersed throughout the three volumes like a decorative feature and disconnected from any textual description.28 Arthur Schott’s illustration of the Seminole chief, NocoShimatt-Tash-Tanaki (Grizzly Bear) appears early in the first volume (Figure 1.4). While there is no direct reference to this image in Emory’s written account, it directly follows commentary about the burden of “controlling Indians” after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which required policing indigenous populations along national lines that had not yet been drawn.29 The illustration was also given a place of prominence

Framing the Frontier 35

Figure 1.4 Arthur Schott’s illustration of the Seminole chief, Noco-ShimattTash-Tanaki, 1859, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey

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in the survey text as it was reproduced as a color lithograph, thus indicating some importance to a visual readership. The Seminole chief’s role in this visual narrative can only be speculated upon. Presumably NocoShimatt-Tash-Tanaki stands as an object lesson, not only about the dangers of the Seminole, but by implication of all indigenous tribes of the borderlands, which would ostensibly be tamped down by fixing the line. Much like Schott’s depiction of the desert landscape, with the detailed intensity of the plant life in foreground, the Seminole chief is rendered larger than life, awkwardly hovering in a tableau of plants that appears disconnected from the territorial horizon being claimed through the survey report. The spatial disjuncture created in the illustrations of the Seminole, Pima (Akimel O’odham) and Papago (Tohono O’odham) reflects an influential geographic conceit first introduced by Alexander von Humboldt in 1817 long before the Mexican–American War. Humboldt believed that a specific isothermal zone traversed the northern hemisphere, one that was most ideally suited to human habitation. The surveys of the borderlands from the 1850s exhibit the influence of Humboldt’s work: American expansionists, like Emory used this theory to justify the border survey as a search for the “southern extremity” of Humboldt’s zone, which he estimated ran somewhere around the 32nd parallel, close to where the borderline between the US and Mexico eventually was drawn.30 The first volume of Humboldt’s widely read Kosmos was published in 1845, and Emory’s survey report would have been understood within a geopolitical universe that was heavily informed by Humboldt’s imagination.31 Emory went further in reading the US–Mexico borderline as one which divided temperate and tropical zones, a natural order between cultural temperaments that was eventually written into national mythology.

Frontier Sensibilities, Lines of Control The North American west was drawn by straight lines: the 32nd and 49th parallels served to delineate the northwestern and southwestern boundaries of the United States. But these boundaries were unusual in their time: until the middle of the 19th century, political boundaries normally followed the course of rivers or mountain ranges which served as relatively permanent points of reference for state boundaries.32 The deepest channel of the Rio Grande, the St. Lawrence River or the Great Lakes therefore formed natural barriers in the east that presented fewer problems technically than the undifferentiated territories of the Sonoran Desert or the Great Plains in the west. As there were few distinguishing landmarks in these regions, demarcating the international boundary lines through the west presented specific challenges. Borderlands historians have stressed the difficulty of creating, maintaining and patrolling the Western half of the US–Mexico boundary in the

Framing the Frontier 37 19th century, a task that was not only physically arduous due to the extreme conditions of the Sonoran Desert, but also complicated by prevailing geographic and cultural forces that ran along a north–south axis, thus making east–west spatial arrangements ineffectual for many years. Oscar Martínez refers to this territory as “troublesome” an idea that will persist throughout the history of the region, becoming amplified in the present. Although the line was surveyed and demarcated, it had no hold over the people of the borderlands whose cultures had long been informed by the predominant geographic features of the Sonoran Desert and Sierra Madre which span the American states of New Mexico and Arizona into Chihuahua on the Mexican side along a north–south axis. Those divided by this section of the border include the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham (recorded as Papago by the Spanish) who were never awarded dual citizenship after the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, even though the border cut through their lands in 1853. And in this difficult terrain Apache tribal lands had also been cultivated over centuries and staunchly defended against incursions from Spanish colonization. The US–Mexico boundary line served as a blunt instrument to divide and conquer the Apaches who were seen as a primary threat to the settlement of the region.33 Similar forces prevailed in the creation of the Alberta–Montana borderlands, the region where the final section of the Canada–US border was drawn along the 49th parallel. This line bisected Blackfoot territory which included the nomadic tribes of Piikáni (Piegan), Káínaa (Blood) and Siksikáwa (Blackfoot). Sheila McManus stresses the crucial role played by a straight unequivocal line in the creation of American and Canadian national space. The survey brought clarity to Ottawa and Washington as remote centers of power by “proving their territorial claims to themselves and others.” More detrimentally, it also established the beginning of a division that would destroy the integrity of Blackfoot lands undermining their self-determination and autonomy. McManus stresses that the coercive techniques of bordering in the 19th century were multiple, designed to prevent mobility and cohesion among the Blackfoot. The national border, along with the reserve/reservation system established in Canada and the US quickly brought an end to traditional forms of sustenance, and within three decades their numbers had been greatly diminished by disease and starvation.34 Most detrimentally, however, these spatial divisions rendered native populations invisible thereby giving the impression of wide open space free for white settlement. These governmental techniques were already apparent in the photographic documentation of the Northwestern Canada–US boundary survey of 1872–1874, discussed below, where native populations were represented as endangered or, in some cases, already dead. The 19th-century boundary surveys therefore served not only to define territorial possessions of the US and Canada, but also as one of the most dramatic acts of colonization over the remaining native populations in North

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America. These surveys were instruments that brought about increasingly controlled sites that produced national space by subsuming and dividing indigenous populations. But in this they were also epistemological tools for producing specific forms of knowledge, classification systems to override the alterity of the newly created borderlands by laying claim to native peoples within a national language of ethnography and natural history.35 In this both boundary surveys participate in forms of “visuality” that Nicholas Mirzoeff finds operative in colonization and plantation economies that were initially described by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century. While the boundary surveys have not been thought of specifically in terms of colonization, they arguably share in the idea of the overseer who assembles a “visualization of history” as definitive act. In this way, Mirzoeff writes, visualization is the “production of visuality . . . the making of the processes of ‘history’ perceptible to authority” and presenting it as “self-evident.”36 This element of visuality in the 1854 United States and Mexican Boundary Survey played a critical role in the transition from the “unexplored territory” of the frontier to the American territory that was in the process of being shaped by the surveys. During the latter half of the 19th century, there were seven surveys that were started on the US–Mexico boundary. Of these, three were significant and only two were brought to completion in 1854 and 1895. At the same time, there was only one survey on the western half of the Canada– US boundary, though it was interrupted by the American Civil War and extended over almost two decades between 1858 and 1874. Taken together, these 19th-century surveys posed a distinct shift in the relationship between the role of territory and the concept of the frontier. As written by American, British and Canadian commissioners, survey narratives, not surprisingly, are filled with the uncertainty and fear of “Indian encounter,” pressing frontier symbolism into the service of boundary demarcation in the 19th century. In “Elements for a Theory of the Frontier,” the geographer Claude Raffestin sees the imperialist conception of a frontier as a geopolitical concept emerging from the 15th century onwards, where it becomes a “political isobar,” or a mobile membrane that is “deformed as the pleasure of the expansion of the state.” While the frontier may act as a border, it is one that can be redrawn and extended. Etymologically, the distinction between a frontier and a border is only really notable in English usage where the term frontier has become synonymous with American mythology. But in European contexts, border and frontier are often used interchangeably. This is complicated by the Latin origins of the term frontier which stems from frons or forehead and is interpreted anthropomorphically as facing, “confronting” or “addressing.”37 These ideas of confrontation remain in the Spanish frontera and the French frontière. It is only in an American context that the conceptual distinction between border and frontier becomes most pronoun-

Framing the Frontier 39 ced. Here, the difference between the two terms is significant and they can be considered mutually exclusive; the frontier disappeared from the map only after national boundaries had been drawn and territory could be measured in terms of population. In the colonial settlement of North America, borders served to justify both national (American) and imperial (British) ambitions, but at the expense of the promise held open by the frontier. The measuring and subsequent “closure” of the frontier in the formation of three modern North American states is imbricated in territory as a means to calculate and control. In 1890, the frontier was removed from the US census, several decades after the completion of the first boundary surveys between the US and Mexico as well as the final surveys of the border between Canada and the US which took place somewhat later. At the same time, the frontier was said to be closed as tracts of free land were no longer available for colonial settlement.38 No longer an open zone on the map, the frontier’s gradual disappearance prompted Frederick Jackson Turner’s troubling reflection on its significance in American history as the “line between civilization and barbarism.”39 What Turner described as a unifying thesis, linked to the ideas of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, still underwrites a powerful founding mythology that underwrites contemporary security discourse and the popular representation of borders in North America. The various representations of territory that emerged in tandem with the border surveys in the mid-to-late 19th century form a complex and highly diverse series that were employed as government documents to shape a national image. The role of the survey image in fashioning national consciousness prior to the US Civil War is very much evident in American archives, but these archives are less central to national history in Canadian and Mexican contexts as the fixing of these boundaries was a much more ambivalent affair. In Canada, the survey was managed mostly under British jurisdiction, while Mexico, as is well known, lost over a third of its territory after the Mexican–American War and the Gadsden Purchase. The 1854 boundary survey, while conducted by both American and Mexican commissions, was a funereal moment in Mexican history. Although the survey along the 49th parallel followed not long after Canadian Confederation in 1867, the relations between British and Canadian members of the survey commission replayed a familiar colonial logic, with divergent agendas for each Chief Commissioner. Additionally, British and American interests in the Northwest were waning as stronger a geopolitical pull exerted itself toward India for the British and California for the Americans.40 The survey of the Canada–US border along the 49th parallel was therefore a much more ambivalent affair with a considerable length of time between the definition of the boundary line with the Jay Treaty between the United States and Britain in 1794 and the delimitation of the line in the late 19th century. While the survey was started in 1858, its progress was

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interrupted by the American Civil War. When it was begun again in 1872 it was a testing ground for photography’s role in geographic and military applications.

Survey Photographers on the 49th Parallel: Of Swamp Logs and Spirit Houses A crown after all is really only a hat. Why does a hat need land? How can a hat own the land? Sidney L. Harring

The 49th parallel has become a synecdoche for the international border between Canada and the continental United States. That this straight line only accounts for approximately half of this particular boundary is beside the point, as it is this part that iconically represents the territorial completion of the Dominion of Canada and the post-Confederation identity of the country. The marking of the 49th parallel also has strong associations with the celebrated red coats of the Royal North-West Mounted Police (now Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and what has become a familiar mythology surrounding the idea of the Medicine Line. However real the Medicine Line might have seemed to the Plains Cree and Lakota seeking refuge from American hostility in the late 19th century, it has become a favorite story we like to tell ourselves in Canada about our perceived kindness toward indigenous people. That ideal of civility has been written into the creation of the Canada–US border, and has subsequently become a founding motif of protection in the creation of the Royal North-West Mounted Police as a sovereign force that marched westward when the survey of the line was complete. However familiar these stories may seem to Canadian readers it should be recalled that the survey of 49th parallel was a project of imperial geography, and that the work of the International Boundary Commission of 1872–1874 was conducted under the auspices of the “Crown” a slippery metaphor if there ever was one. “Why does a hat need land?”, Sidney L. Harring asks in paraphrasing the defense of the Cree Chief Big Bear during the trial of the Riel Rebellion in 1885, an event that took place a decade after the completion of the Northwestern boundary survey. Chief Big Bear’s translated remarks offer piercing clarity in the face of Victorian law and its application for colonial subjects. Harring notes the tragi-comic weight of legal metaphor along with the swift creation of indigenous imperial subjects who were governed remotely from London or Ottawa and suddenly accused of treason against the crown.41 The 49th parallel provided the territorial medium for the “hat that needed land” in the late 19th century as the longstanding private empire of the Hudson’s Bay Company was collapsing and as the Americans, suddenly idle at the end of the Civil War, issued random calls for annexation of the northwest with the slogan “54 40 or fight.”

Framing the Frontier 41 The survey of the northwestern boundary between the United States and the newly formed dominion of Canada took place against a backdrop of shifting power relations that included tensions among Native American populations in the northwest as well as the Red River Rebellion of 1869. As the Canadian government had purchased the territory of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company that same year, the lead was taken by a jointly appointed British–Canadian team to survey the international boundary between British and American territorial possessions in the northwest as the final stretch of the border between Canada and the United States. It was also the last international North American boundary survey to claim and divide indigenous land by mapping territory in the image of two developing nation states. Running from the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods to the Continental Divide along the 49th parallel, the survey traversed the relatively flat terrain of the Great Plains ending in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Like the 1854 border survey between Mexico and the US, which took place two decades earlier, the physical challenges of the survey were defined by extreme weather. Though the earlier Mexican and American commissions had to contend with sand and heat, the American, British and Canadian commissions were faced with swamps and mosquitoes during the summer and frigid temperatures during most of the winter. Both surveys therefore occupy a significant place in the annals of 19th-century North American exploration narratives. While there are numerous written accounts of challenges and hardships of this survey, the image archive has received less attention. This is particularly the case with the portfolio of photographs that were produced during the 1872–1876 International Boundary Survey where photography played a critical role in the joint Canadian–British commission’s work. By the 1870s, the Royal Engineers had eagerly adopted photography in their military intelligence operations throughout the British Empire.42 Donald Roderick Cameron, the appointed head of the British– Canadian Joint Boundary Commission, took the imperial British enthusiasm for photography seriously and insisted upon using it to document sites of “scientific interest.” 43 Although the role of images within the North American border surveys becomes increasingly central by the end of the 19th century, these initial engagements with photography were more ambivalent. On the whole, the photographs from the 1872 Boundary Commission were more impressionistic than scientific in the sense that Cameron had hoped for. The resulting images from this 900-mile survey did not present a coherent picture of the boundary line in the same manner as Emory’s 1857 Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary, for example, which relied upon older techniques of topographical landscape illustration. While there was much enthusiasm about the use of photography in this survey, the images occupy an uncertain or ambiguous place in the Joint Commission’s work. There were at least 256 photographs taken during the two years in the field but these did not become part of a larger

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narrative volume.44 The Commission’s papers were published independently and Major Cameron’s contentious final report was described as “very bulky and scarcely readable in its present form” when it was received in London in 1876. It was subsequently filed as confidential material in the Foreign Office for many years afterward.45 It might therefore be surmised that the absence of such an authoritative volume speaks to internal problems within the Joint Commission as well as critical differences in the role of the international boundary in the annals of American and Canadian history. The majority of the images are landscapes and documentation of the surveying commission in the field: establishing camps and barracks, sappers cutting the line and building boundary mounds, for example. Thus photography was used to document the various activities of the Joint Commission rather than as a systematic tool for recording the locations of the boundary markers as the topographical landscape illustrations had done in previous boundary surveys.46 Images of indigenous peoples of the Great Plains also form a notable part of this photographic archive and these unwittingly provide an ambiguous record of unsettlement of the region prior to western expansion. This is perhaps where photography failed its enthusiasts in producing the kind of certainty desired by the Commission in its first comprehensive survey of the Canada–US borderlands. The unease of the British–Canadian commission in its encounters with indigenous presence along the prairies is palpable even in the most ordinary group portraits of the Commission where Ojibwe and Assiniboine men (employed as guides and porters at various stages) were photographed alongside the British and Canadian members of the commission. This photographic archive is notable as it served as an early experiment in what eventually emerges as governmental photography, though in 1874 these images betray a certain kind of naïveté about the role of photography within the political process of international boundary demarcation.47 Two decades later, photography will be mastered as an epistemological tool for the production of a national image, both in the documentation of the boundary and to visually identify who belongs on either side. But, between 1872 and 1874, this was less than clear, and the first photographic archive reveals the uncertainty that the boundary demarcation sought to fix. One of the first images in the Commission’s photographic portfolio depicts Major Cameron sitting alone at the edge of a Ojibwe encampment on an island in Lake of the Woods (Figure 1.5). This image of the lone Chief Commissioner suggests tensions that will persist throughout the survey: between Cameron himself and Archibald Campbell, the Chief Surveyor of the American contingent, and between the two surveying commissions and the Assiniboine, Ojibwe and Crow encountered throughout the survey.48 Though this is beginning of a long survey across the prairies, Cameron does not strike the typical pose of the surveyor-explorer at the outset of a campaign. Rather, unaware of the camera, he appears weary,

Framing the Frontier 43 staring at the Ojibwe grave directly in front of him. Cameron’s forlorn gaze in this image anticipates two themes that will characterize the survey: the monotony and arduousness of the task of stamping a line through swamp, forest and prairie in extreme weather; as well as the uncertainty of mediating tensions between the two surveying commissions and the indigenous prairie tribes which were aggravated by heightened American military campaigns against them just south of the 49th parallel. However, Cameron’s detachment from the scene most likely stems from a more immediate problem in September 1872 involving the identification of a specific log and the uncertain boundaries of Lake of the Woods. The first task of the Survey was to locate a single boundary marker that was put in place in 1824 after the London Convention of 1818. This described, in true imperial fashion, the western boundary between British and American possessions as one that would be drawn from the “most northwestern point of Lake of the Woods [due south] to the 49th parallel” which would then travel westward, traversing the continent to the Pacific Ocean.49 In the intervening 48 years, the oak post that served as the official boundary marker had essentially disappeared as it was indistinguishable from the

Figure 1.5 Chippewa wigwams and grave on one of the islands at the Northwest Angle, Lake of the Woods. Captain D.R. Cameron, Commissioner, is at right sitting by an Indian grave, 1872 (Library and Archives Canada/National Archives of Canada fonds/PA-074663)

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wetlands landscape of brush and stunted trees. It took several weeks to locate a log that, when excavated, would serve as evidence of the original point.50 At stake was the promontory of land known as the Northwest Angle. If the log in question did mark the most northwestern point of Lake of the Woods, the possibility of an overland route that bypassed American territory would be foreclosed. The log was dug out and photographed as evidence that fit the boundary description of 1818, even in its waterlogged and decayed state (Figure 1.6). But Cameron refused to accept the swamp log as sufficient confirmation, preferring instead to search for evidence that it was supposed to be located on nearest “solid ground” to the Northwest Angle. Cameron located a granite promontory, the site upon which he ostensibly sits in the first photograph, but failed to find evidence of a marker to fit the description.51 So, in October 1872, Major Cameron is photographed sitting upon the site he wished to claim as British territory with an Ojibwe jiibegamig or spirit house dominating the foreground. In his final and unpublished report of 1876, Cameron will come to express a somewhat sympathetic though largely patronizing attitude toward the “North West Canadian Indians” with the intent of creating institutions to assimilate indigenous tribes with greater success than previous Christian missions. Cameron’s report

Figure 1.6 Log taken from reference monument, Northwest Angle, 1872 (Library and Archives of Canada/Royal Canadian Mounted Police fonds/C-024514)

Framing the Frontier 45 offended his peers, not because of his recommendations, but rather due to his unrestrained criticism of policies of the Dominion government and the Hudson’s Bay Company which created, in his words, a “miserable struggle for bare existence” among the natives he had encountered during the survey.52 Cameron’s proximity to the Ojibwe in the photograph was most likely an arrangement worked out between Captain Anderson of the Joint Commission and the Ojibwe men who only agreed to work under the condition that their families could follow the Commission’s observatory camp and be protected while they were working in the field. Where the Ojibwe relied on hunting and trapping for sustenance, the area had been “trapped out” by the French by the end of the 19th century. Flour and bacon were thus traded in exchange for labor, though Anderson noted most lived in conditions of “grinding poverty.”53 Cameron looks as though he is presiding over the burial site in a manner that vaguely suggests imperial oversight of the recently deceased, a reading that takes liberties with the gap between the photograph and the scattered references to encounters with prairie tribes in the various reports and letters from the Commission. However, the British commissioners generally felt a sense of cultural superiority over their American counterparts in regard to their relations with indigenous tribes in the Great Lakes region, which informed their expectations as they surveyed westward. This was not to suggest their naïveté, only that their curiosity about the “Indians” they encountered was tempered by caution due to the fact that they were working in close proximity to their American counterparts. The American commission had demanded military escort from the British as they completed their work as they were surveying in the midst of a series of “Indian Wars” of the US government’s own making.54 It is difficult to say how the British commissioning team justified their work in terms of larger political questions, but Cameron’s later remarks betray a sense of paternalism not uncommon within British imperial ideology of the late 19th century. While the international boundary along the 49th parallel may not have been an immediate priority for Britain with its rule of India in the ascendancy, the general sentiment that will eventually be expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” seems already to be a generative force at work in the survey. The interest in the burial customs of the Sioux and Ojibwe as documented in several images, along with the jarring photograph of “dead Crow Indians” suggests as much. These images are undoubtedly the most violent in the archive and they are only described factually (Figure 1.7 and Figure 1.8). The remains of the massacred Crow were found in the summer of 1874 when the Commission had reached its final point in West Butte in the Alberta–Montana borderlands. George Mercer Dawson (the esteemed Canadian geologist on the Survey) encountered the remains near the camp and ordered documentation of the disturbing scene. It had been relayed to Dawson that the Crow were attacked and killed by their Piegan rivals, who had

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arranged their bodies in a circular fashion and scalped them as a warning to the Crow.55 The commission happened upon the scene some time later, as evident from the advanced state of decay of the corpses that were exposed to the sun and partially eaten by wolves. Oddly, a sapper was placed centrally within the scene, apparently “for scale.”56 Sitting with his rifle across his lap, the image is easily read in terms of trophy hunting, reinforcing the terms of colonial violence even though the sapper himself was not implicated in the killing. Here we can only speculate on the relationship between the seated white man and the “dead Indian” created through the image, a relationship that was in no way self-evident or linked to the Commission’s stated purpose. Yet at the same time, these images should not be discounted as trivial souvenirs of a maiden expedition of British and Canadian geographers along the Great Plains. Rather they might productively be read in terms of what they demonstrated in the context of a larger political project to prepare newly acquired Dominion land for expansion and settlement. Given what was to follow politically after the completion of the boundary survey, these photographs, which find parallels in contemporary photographs of genocide, provided the visual evidence necessary for a politics of intervention. This eventually took form as a “Canadian” Indian policy that would peaceably aid white settlement without falling into the kind of conflict that the Americans had created along the plains, and the westward

Figure 1.7 Group of dead Crow Indians that were killed by the Piegans during the winter of 1873–1874 (Library and Archives of Canada/Thomas Millman fonds/PA-074646)

Framing the Frontier 47

Figure 1.8 Mode of disposing of the dead among the Indians. Three-hundred miles west of Red River, 1872–1875 (Library and Archives of Canada/Thomas Millman fonds/PA-057919)

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march of the North-West Mounted Police in 1874 stands as one of the most celebrated chapters of Canadian history. According to Sidney Harring, relations between the NWMP and the Prairie First Nations were, at least initially, quite functional as the structure of political and legal governance they represented was “familiar to the tribes, consistent with their traditional forms of meeting and face-to-face negotiation.” 57 However, by the 1880s as the Indian Department cut rations to starvation levels in order to “force Indians to work as small farmers,” the burden of law enforcement put on the NWMP became unmanageable. By the late 1880s, the trial and imprisonment of Prairie First Nations for petty crime became increasingly common and their sentences particularly severe after the North West Rebellion in 1885.58 Long-term policies that followed the institutional completion of the Canada–US border throw into question the enduring metaphor of the Medicine Line for the 49th parallel as a seemingly magical and protective barrier from American forces for Prairie First Nations and American Indians in the late 19th century. As Harring and McManus have argued, negotiations between the Prairie First Nations and the Canadian government were mired in mistranslation, misunderstanding and bad faith. Often at issue was a conflicting concept of land which the British, Americans and Canadians understood through the lens of territory, while indigenous people generally had no comparable framework. The sale of Rupert’s Land to the government of Canada in 1869 was therefore a particularly egregious transaction as the land was not understood to be “owned” by either government as it was “Indian land” to begin with.59

From Survey to Surveillance: Techniques and Technologies The international boundary surveys worked to partition and control the west, cutting across indigenous lands and remaking them in the image of American and Canadian national territory. Stuart Elden refers to the creation of territory in the West as an “emergent technique” a “distinctive mode of spatial/social organization that is historically and geographically limited and dependent.”60 The idea of territory coincides with a specific concept of land ownership, one that positions space as a “political category: owned, distributed, mapped, calculated, bordered, and controlled.” The North American boundary surveys in the 19th century were technical processes or instruments to create territory in the name of new nation states, but they quickly became sites of differentiation and surveillance. Etymologically, the terms survey and surveillance do not share the same root; but there are important connections here within an emergent logic of visuality that informs a modern lexicon of policing. The word survey comes from the late 15th century when it is used both in the sense of supervision and examination, and this term was in use several centuries

Framing the Frontier 49 before surveillance, which emerges only in the early part of the 19th century. Though we tend to think of surveying and surveillance as distinct processes, their etymological origins are remarkably similar.61 Similarly, the 19th-century project of demarcating the international boundary lines that created the map of North America was almost immediately followed by the development of a border complex that defined national spaces at the same time as national subjects. Indigenous people found their identities and social foundations redefined by the goals of an emergent nationalism that worked in tandem with the newly drawn boundary to partition their lands and their mobility. The international boundary lines thus worked as a “method” to create knowledge that determined practices of inclusion and exclusion.62 As sites of institutional or bureaucratic control these borders emerged more operationally at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th as immigration to the US and Canada soared. With institutionalization came a set of visual codes that were stamped into the landscape as checkpoints and ports of entry and managed through photography as a means of defining and controlling population. These established the border as a site to be watched: rules that required that the line be visible meant that border towns had to destroy many buildings that straddled the line. Ports of entry had to establish clear sightlines to monitor trans-border crime: the town of Nogales between the states of Arizona (US) and Sonora (Mexico), for example, was divided and a sixty-foot reserve strip was cleared for state oversight of criminal activity.63 Additionally, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1874, which came into effect not long after the completion of the survey of the Canada–US border, had emerged by the end of the century as a flashpoint for immigration control that posed a threat equal to that of the Mexico–US border by the end of the 19th century.64 According to Anna Pegler-Gordon, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first in a series to identify and control immigration within an ethnically and racially defined system which relied upon visual inspections and photography. By 1875, the first photographic identification cards were issued to Chinese immigrants who were singled out for visual inspection.65 By the 1890s, many of the original boundary markers set in place from the first survey of the US–Mexico border had gone missing or were displaced. They were replaced by large marble or cement obelisks as a more permanent solution as, by this time, both the representation of the border and the attitudes toward it were shifting. Along the southern border, the use of photography coincides with increasing state control over the region. In 1894, the US government organized a commission to resurvey and re-map the international boundary line between Mexico and the US. This second survey was documented by photography exclusively, and there was no attempt to glorify the landscape as the first survey had done in 1854.66 What we see between the mid-19th-century surveys and those of the late 19th century is a transition from the topographical

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and picturesque gaze to one that is increasingly clinical by the end of the 19th century. And, as the first government-issued passports came into use in 1917, the line shifted from an “imaginary” one as demarcated by the survey, to a firmly dividing line that helped define a “national” gaze informed by photographic practices.67 As the Canada–US and the Mexico–US borders established, they became sites of “vigilant visuality”, a term that Louise Amoore uses to describe the politics of biometric borders in the 21st century.68 However, these forms of visuality that Amoore describes were at work from the earliest moments of the border’s formation as it became a site to monitor for immigration and smuggling. Kornel Chang notes that the during the early years of the 20th century, the Canada–US border shifted from a “patchwork system” of monitoring Chinese migration under the Exclusion Act to a new “locus of new disciplinary power” for surveillance and social control that served to render the border legible and natural.69 The first bureaucratic sectors of the US Border Patrol were set up in Detroit, Michigan and El Paso, Texas in 1924, where officers were permanently stationed to control alcohol smuggling after the Volstead Act came into effect. Along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was organized by 1933, these two institutions established the architecture of a modern border checkpoint. These institutions worked to condition border-crossing behaviors, including the mandatory presentation of photo ID in urban regions where cross-border movements were not previously regulated en masse.70 As the border emerged institutionally by the early 20th century, it worked to create a specific “distribution of the sensible” to return to Jacques Rancière, creating “here” and “there,” “them” and “us” that became visible through policing practices and photographic identification. This is where we might see Rancière’s concept of “the police” at work as a “symbolic function of the social.” In the checkpoints and photographic documents that produced the border as sites of differentiation and vigilance, we see “the police” at work as a certain way of “dividing up the sensible.” It is “sensory self-evidence” that determines “what is visible and what is not, what can be heard and what cannot.”71 While the state sponsored the 19th-century surveys, the perception and understanding of the borderline’s effects did not take place immediately or evenly, building only through specific moments of crisis (seen through immigration control or smuggling) over the last century and a half. These crises were frequently followed by institutional change. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1875 or creation of the Border Patrol in the 1920s are some of these early moments where the line creates a partition that is legible as a line of alterity. These “vigilant visualities” produced around the border in its early years continue to inform the ongoing preoccupation with increased fortification and surveillance that condition the idea of the homeland, discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

Framing the Frontier 51 However, the production of the border, through its precise fixed lines and boundary markers as well as its checkpoints and identity papers, did not eclipse the frontier’s prominence as a concept. Rather, by the end of the 19th century the idea of the frontier gained traction as a unified history, one that was almost instantaneously tinged with nostalgia as it was conceived. The concept circulated first as a powerful literary trope in the 19th century, the rise of the printing press playing a central role in the circulation of a national mythology that was often out of step with the sectarian politics of the era.72 Geoff King notes that the American nation was born conceptually long before being defined geographically. It was already seen through a series of “Renaissance conventions” in advance of its exploration and mapping. Although the frontier disappeared from the map after the completion of western border surveys of the 19th century, its ability to stage a “confrontation with radical otherness” has meant that it returns perennially as a cultural theme throughout the 20th century and into the present. As a longstanding mythology, the frontier tends toward the effect of doubling, producing confusion between the real and the actual.73 It returns alternately as the nostalgic entertainment of Hollywood film or through domestication in theme parks. By the middle of the 20th century, the frontier becomes individualized in the genre of the road trip, replete with roadside motels bearing pioneering frontier motifs just as the Cold War and John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” program re-purposed the enduring concept in the space race. As the border was drawn and institutionalized, the frontier shifted from a vaguely defined location to far-ranging imaginative sites throughout the 20th century. The confrontation with alterity activated through the idea of the frontier may seem like a well worn trope, but it merits reconsideration in light of contemporary discussions of politics. The multiple techniques of measuring and calculating the extent of national territory in defining the border in the 19th century failed to eradicate the uncertainty that defined the frontier. As such, the frontier is imbricated in the historical archives that were formed by the creation of the two borderlines, becoming evident only when the line failed in its bid to bind together, mark or control national territory as anticipated. The frontier was also eventually sublimated as the “authentic” American experience only after the two borders were officially surveyed and established, becoming a reminder of an inaccessible past. It comes to play the role of a supplement or remainder that shifts according to context, standing for everything from chaos, uncertainty and fear, to opportunity, ingenuity and self-reliance: in short, everything that the territorial division of the border aimed to govern and control.

Notes 1 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 292.

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2 Claude Raffestin, “Elements of a Theory of the Frontier,” trans. Jeanne Ferguson, Diogenes, 34: 134 (1986): 1–18, 5. 3 Rob Shields, “Boundary Thinking in Theories of the Present: The Virtuality of Reflexive Modernization,” European Journal of Social Theory 9: 2 (2006): 223–237, 226. The performative emphasis of bordering is also stressed in Peter Andreas’s Border Games and Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. 4 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US–Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 37. On the Canadian border see Andrew J. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission: Three Photographic Expeditions, 1872–74,” History of Photography, 20: 2 (1996): 113–121, 115. 5 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10. 6 Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 17. 7 Raffestin, “Elements for a Theory of the Frontier,” 2. 8 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 9 Sheila McManus, The Line which Separates: Race, Gender and the Making of the Alberta–Montana Borderlands (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005). 10 Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 107. 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33. 12 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 14. 13 Ariella Azoulay, “Getting Rid of the Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political,” Theory, Culture and Society, 27: 7–8 (2010), 239–262, 248. 14 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics”, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 39. 15 William Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Made under the Direction of William Emory (Washington: C. Wendell, printer,1857–1859), 67. DOI: 10.5962/bhl.title.213 16 Kris Fresonke, West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 75. 17 Rebert, Paula, “The Report on the Mexican and United States Boundary Survey 1857–1859.” Accessed April 10, 2015 at: www.sochistdisc.org/2005_ articles/rebert_article.htm 18 Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 65. 19 Alex Hunt, “Mapping the Terrain, Marking the Earth: William Emory and the Writing of the US–Mexico Border,” in Martin Brückner and Hsuan Lu (Eds.), American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 127. 20 Fresonke, West of Emerson, 74. 21 Rebert, “The Report on the Mexican and United States Boundary Survey.” 22 Robert Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 29. 23 The first volume of Emory’s report was published first in 1857, two years before volumes 2 and 3 which included the botanical and geological reports. See Kelsey, Archive Style, 31.

Framing the Frontier 53 24 Kelsey, Archive Style, 44. 25 Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 11. 26 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2001), 20. 27 Emory states at the outset of Volume 1: “it will not be convenient to arrange these sections in the order in which the work was pursued, nor to follow the order in which the general view was presented, commencing on the Pacific and ending on the Gulf of Mexico.” No rationale was given for his decision to order the report from east to west. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 53. 28 The previous 1850 survey by John Russell Bartlett was much more ethnographic in its emphasis. However, Bartlett was dismissed from his post as Boundary Commissioner in 1853 by President Franklin Pierce. Bartlett was charged with making concessions to Mexico through the Bartlett–Garcia Conde compromise, which aimed to resolve issues with the map used in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. See Robert Gunn, “John Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, War and the United States Boundary Survey,” Western American Literature, 46: 4 (2012): 348–380, 353. 29 Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 52. 30 Fresonke, West of Emerson, 133. 31 Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13. 32 Ladis K.D. Kristof, “The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries,” in Roger E. Kasperson and Julian V. Minghi (Eds.), The Structure of Political Geography (New Brunswick and London: Aldine Transaction, 2011), 128. 33 Oscar, Martínez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2006), 35. 34 McManus, The Line which Separates, 84–85. 35 Emory’s survey followed an earlier boundary commission led by John Russell Bartlett who had secured 25 000 dollars from the Indian Bureau to collect “statistical and historical facts of the tribes north of the Gila and east of the Colorado [rivers].” As the total budget of Bartlett’s survey was 50 000 dollars, this was a substantial sum directed to ethnography, which Robert Gunn argues was employed as a form of military reconnaissance. While Bartlett was dismissed due to partisan politics and unable to complete the boundary demarcation, this primarily ethnographic survey set a precedent for the more “official” survey of 1854 that followed. Robert Gunn. “John Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, War and the United States Boundary Survey,” Western American Literature, 46: 4 (2012): 348–380, 352. 36 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 2. 37 Alan K. Henrikson, “Border Regions as Neighbourhoods,” in Doris WastlWalter (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 96. 38 Elizabeth Furniss, “Imagining the Frontier: Comparative Perspectives from Canada and Australia,” in Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Harding Davis (Eds.), Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005), 23– 46, 23. 39 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association,

54

40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

The Territorial Imagination July 12, 1893. Accessed June 30, 2015 at: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,” 113. Sidney L. Harring, “There Seemed to be No Recognized Law: Canadian Law and the Prairie First Nations,” in Louis Knafla and Jonathan Swainger (Eds.), Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West: 1670–1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 93. James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 78. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,” 114. This collection of photographs is held in the National Archives of Canada, but there is no official report. George Mercer Dawson’s more renowned report, Geology and Resources of the Region in the Vicinity of the 49th Parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, with Lists of Plants and Animals Collected (1857–1873) has come to serve as the natural history chapter of this survey. John E. Parsons, West on the 49th Parallel: Red River to the Rockies 1872–1876 (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 137. Parsons writes with reference to the 1872 survey: “Just how hard the task was, and the problems and vicissitudes of the British, American and Canadian surveyors in relatively unexplored Indian country, provide the substance for this account. Among other things it explains why today only one boundary monument in a thousand stands precisely at 49 degrees north latitude.” Parsons, West on the 49th Parallel, x. According to Tony Rees, the glass negatives of the photographs were deposited at the School of Military Engineering in Chatham, England. Prints were made for various personal collections (now held at the National Archives of Canada) and to illustrate parts of the US Commission’s report. The glass negatives are missing and it is thought that they were destroyed during World War II bombing raids. Tony Rees, Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World’s Longest Undefended Border across the Western Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 354. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,” 116. Parsons, West on the 49th Parallel, 5. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,”115. Rees, Arc of the Medicine Line, 50. Parsons, West on the 49th Parallel, 138. Rees, Arc of the Medicine Line, 57. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,” 114. Rees, Arc of the Medicine Line, 114. Birrell, “The North American Boundary Commission,” 120. Harring, “There Seemed to be No Recognized Law,” 95. Harring, “There Seemed to be No Recognized Law,” 97. Harring, “There Seemed to be No Recognized Law,” 102. Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10. The word survey (in the sense “examine and ascertain the condition of”)comes from the old French surveier and medieval Latin supervidere, from super“over” + videre “to see.” Surveillance from French surveil (over watch). The earliest use of the word surveillance was from 1799. The Compact Oxford

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72 73

English Dictionary, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1974. Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, viii. St. John, Line in the Sand, 94. Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the US–Canadian Borderlands, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 147. Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of US Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 13. St. John, Line in the Sand, 91. Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America, 17. Louise Amoore, “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror,” Security Dialogue, 38: 2 (2007): 215–232. DOI: 10.1177/09670106 07078526 Chang, Pacific Connections, 149. Thomas A. Klug,”The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Making of a Border-Crossing Culture on the US–Canada Border, 1891–1941,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 40: 3 (2010): 395–415, 399. DOI: 10.1080/02722011.2010.496903 Rancière, Dissensus, 36. King, Mapping Reality, 113. King, Mapping Reality, 117.

2

Homeland as Home Front Terror, Territory and Television

A Place from Which People Are Frightened In August 2013, Claire Danes appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine wearing a golden trench coat. The Fox 21 series, Homeland, which features Danes as a feisty, bipolar CIA agent, had just won critical acclaim for its seemingly realistic portrayal of American intelligence operations in the 21st century. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the six-page spread featured Danes and Damian Lewis (the male lead for the first three seasons) in a series of erotically charged photo spreads that traded on a kind of Cold War spy chic. Danes modeled designer dresses in scenarios that ranged from interrogation cell to master bedroom, all rendered in a suburbangothic color palette reminiscent of the film American Beauty (1999). The Vogue feature portrayed counter-terrorism efforts as sexy and enigmatic in the immediate aftermath of the Snowden affair. But Homeland has more generally been praised for its sophistication and complexity. The show has been received as a more mature version of “terror television,” a genre that first emerged through shows like 24, which featured the Rambo-like “patriot” character Jack Bauer who typified the good-against-evil snapshot of world politics that has become standard fare in mainstream television and Hollywood film.1 What Homeland signaled and the Vogue spread confirmed is the domestication of the War on Terror, fully accepted and intimately acculturated. Old tropes from the Cold War have been revitalized in popular culture where the line between friend and enemy is portrayed as difficult to discern and the figure of the double agent looms large in the cultural imagination. These tropes overshadow the simplicity of geographical metaphors like “the axis of evil,” the hallmark slogan of 2002 which fed much of the first generation of terror television in programs that ranged from reality shows like the National Geographic Channel’s Border Wars to thrillers like 24.2 Homeland signals a shift in the field of policy operations that is popular culture: Deepa Kumar and Arun Kundnani offer that “Homeland’s key accomplishment is to naturalize the workings of the national security state in the Obama era.”3 However astute this observation, it raises

Homeland as Home Front 57 more questions than it answers. What can be made of the concept of the “homeland,” an idea that was codified only when the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002, well before the television series began? How is American territory imaged and imagined in an era of networked intelligence and networked threats? And how has the border as a symbolic line, not only between nation states, but more fundamentally, between inside and out, between friend and enemy become more complex and enigmatic as the idea of the homeland increases in the public imagination? In reflecting on the so-called “War on Terror”, the geographer, Stuart Elden, draws an inextricable link between the concept of terror and that of territory. Rather than seeing territory as an outmoded concept in the face of globalization, he argues that it is an “important and neglected issue.” In the geographies of fear created by the second Bush administration, we were repeatedly informed that terror operated independently of existing states and conventional notions of territory. But terror and territory are intertwined rather than opposed, Elden writes, locating terror within a specific etymology of territory. Rather than seeing territory as a naturalized concept where human life is understood to be rooted in the land, Elden stresses the idea that territory can also be linked to another Latin root, “tarritorium” (from terrere) which translates as “a place from which people are frightened.” Elden’s insight into the concept of territory also suggests a sensibility about space and place in Western culture that has been revitalized both through the spatial metaphors of American foreign policy and in the fortification blitz of the last decade or so that has taken place on the border and other ports of entry. This placement of terror within territory unseats the familiarity of homeland as a bulwark against the uncertainty or danger that lies outside. If terror is intrinsic to territory, rather than an autonomous foreign entity that can be kept outside the gates, then we can begin to unpack the seeming paradoxes of borders and border security in an era that has been characterized through supposedly “deterritorialized” networks and “extra-territorial” sites of conflict and imprisonment. In locating terror’s uncanny resonances as an operative force within contemporary American culture it is possible to comprehend how the border has proliferated and multiplied metaphorically. The dichotomy established between the concept of a vaguely defined “homeland” and the collection of unstable global cartographies described through foreign policy documents and news media has prompted the militarization of everyday life. Participatory vigilance and self-defense have become forms of do-it-yourself policing that ensure membership in the homeland, where militarized identities are actively marketed and promoted as civilian roles. In this context, territorial borders have become aggrandized, not only through increased fortification, but also as a galvanizing force that moves to the center of national consciousness. Todd Miller refers to a “Border

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Patrol Nation” that has emerged over the last decade as a significant shift in American consciousness. This is a “growth industry” that determines domestic policing policy at every level, from the Department of Homeland Security, to municipal police departments, private security firms, voluntary citizens watch groups and militias.4 Miller writes of security expos in the southwest where salesmen boast of “bringing the war to the border” selling items such as plastic barrel cactuses equipped with hidden security cameras that can be installed throughout the semi-arid border region of the Sonoran Desert. The supposed danger of the border has permeated every corner of American culture which is increasingly hypervigilant, eager to buy up a security agenda driven by polymorphous anxiety and fear that extends deep into the heartland as homeland, where the border has produced a generalized edge condition that reproduces the war-like conditions of the frontier as an everyday occurrence. What has often been referred to as the “politics of fear,” a phrase that has been with us for some time now, needs to be further unpacked. This chapter situates the “politics of fear” both within the context of what has broadly been called a “post-political” spectrum of critical thinking, and as a spatial arrangement or territorial framework, where the concept of the homeland can be seen as new ideological lease on the old idea of territory, as a “place from which people are frightened.”5 The re-bordering of American territory needs to be considered alongside these more general political trends. The homeland circulates as a specific configuration of territory that brings with it a reinvigorated sense of vigilance in American culture that can be traced in a number of cultural formations of the last decade, from civilian militias to television shows and border patrol-issued coloring books. In short this is what Nicholas Mirzoeff has described in his reading of “counterinsurgency” as the production of culture both domestically and as military strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq (and, more recently, Libya). “Counterinsurgency”, writes Mirzoeff, is “explicitly a cultural war to be fought in the United States as much as it is in Iraq;” it has become “a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy,” one so successful that it remains “unquestioned.” 6 In considering these popular trends, or “war as culture,” I want to make strange both the idea of the homeland and that of territory. These concepts are so familiar and beyond question that we fail to see how they become naturalized and overlooked. While the idea of the border has become central to public imagination as a part of the War on Terror, it is still an enigmatic and slippery concept that is intimately linked to shifting ideas of territory. This territorial reconfiguration of the homeland gains its power through its ability to function aesthetically, working as a deeply entrenched “distribution of the sensible” in Jacques Rancière’s terms. Reading into the idea of the homeland further, it is possible to locate its operations within a post-panoptical “complex of visuality,” one that Mirzoeff connects with counterinsurgency as a strategy. I wish to suggest that Mirzoeff and

Homeland as Home Front 59 Ranciere’s theoretical ideas run parallel to one another and reading them at the same time enables a deeper understanding of how territory, bordering and belonging have been framed in relation to the idea of the homeland in recent years. The homeland is a powerful territorial metaphor that only came into widespread use in American culture after 9/11. The militarization of the border developed simultaneously with the lexicon of the homeland, which was used first as a concept in security language and now more broadly as part of the popular imagination through media and television, most notably in the popular television series of the same name. The Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2002 in a swift internal reorganization of a number of agencies within the US government; this much is well documented. Borders have been “thickened” and the ranks of the Border Patrol have grown exponentially.7 What is less noted is how this semantic shift toward the homeland in security and policy discourse has worked to fashion a renewed attachment to territory in American culture. The idea of the homeland, not surprisingly leaves open more questions than answers, despite its familiar implications: For example, where does the homeland end and begin? As a geographic term, it seems purposefully vague, leaving open for interpretation a coherent political definition of what it includes or excludes: Is the homeland contiguous states only? Or does it extend to American territories, protectorates? Are Alaska, or Hawaii, part of the homeland, both playing a central role in the atavistic frontier narratives of the 20th century? Or is the homeland more akin to the heartland, an idea of middle America at the center of the North American continent where the implicitly racialized whiteness of lost farming communities and manufacturing industries masks the complexity of diasporas that traverse the continent both in the past and currently. Amy Kaplan’s analysis of the term homeland is revealing. Prior to George W. Bush’s presidency, it had never appeared in official speeches or government documents even during periods of world crisis. “Does the homeland offer a new paradigm of national identity?” she asked, over a decade ago, “Will it catch on?” Kaplan notes the important semantic shift that results from the choice of the term homeland to refer to matters of national security. She suggests that the idea of the homeland introduces a sense of nostalgia for an imagined home that is lost or inaccessible, a folksy and purist notion of an innocent past. Along with nostalgia, the idea of the homeland introduces a measure of defensiveness: It is “something a larger power threatens to occupy or take away, and one has to fight to regain.”8 In this context, security operations are linguistic and performative phenomena as much as they are a function of the vast edifice that forms the Department of Homeland Security. Security discourse serves to mask profound insecurity both within the context of North America and internationally as the theatre of war in the Middle East extends both spatially and temporally. While the idea of

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the homeland is relatively new, it made its initial appearance in a controversial white paper, “Project for a New American Century,” which was written in response to the end of the Cold War by a group of neoconservative security analysts in the mid-1990s. The PNAC put forward a new global cartography of emergent instability. Political geographers have noted how quickly the world map was carved up into post-national zones that focused on “rogue states”, “global hotspots” and the “non-integrating gap.” This became a powerful new narrative that filled the void left in foreign policy as the Soviet threat subsided, one in which, Elden writes, “militant Islam and the ‘war on drugs’” could be “scripted into a coherent story.”9 In this post-Cold War context, the homeland came to play a much larger role in defining a resurgent sense of American nationalism that has often played itself out around the idea of border. The changing morphology of borders has been well documented in a global context. Étienne Balibar, Didier Bigo, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have written on the shifting role of international borders in a postCold War context, variously employing altered topologies such as the Möbius strip as a metaphor for territorial borders or the idea of the border as a “method” for multiplying labor forces within late capitalism.10 North American borders, however have been treated symptomatically and the focus tends to be centered on the US–Mexico border as the most apparent site of confrontation and militarization on the continent. But the changing dimensions of bordering in North America cannot be considered without taking into account the shifts that have taken place domestically and internally, shifts that have been driven by the promotion of participatory vigilance and watchful behavior. The idea of the homeland as a territorial framework has contributed significantly to the American perception of its borders and the successful implementation of what could be described as neo-conservative geographies of fear.11 Étienne Balibar focuses on the polysemy in the contemporary meaning of the border in Europe, and notes two characteristics: the first is that borders are everywhere, dispersed from the “outer limits of territories;” while the second observation is that peripheral regions and border areas are zones of difference and cultural confrontation that are at the center of the public sphere and the public imagination.12 While Balibar bases his observations on the borders of the European Union, his remarks seem equally pertinent in a North American context. Balibar’s first observation, that the borders are dispersed, can be seen in the Department of Homeland Security’s establishment of internal checkpoints along roadways within 100–150 miles of land borders, as well as its public announcement campaigns in shopping malls and roadside billboards. Balibar’s second point, that borders are sites of cultural confrontation, can be thought of in the way that the figure of the migrant and the figure of the terrorist have often become confused around the site of the border. These multiple meanings of the border in contemporary culture play into the idea of the

Homeland as Home Front 61 homeland, which has come to serve as a contemporary home front as the frontiers of American military investment expand in the theatre of war in the Middle East. Balibar’s observation that borders are decoupled from geographic peripheries does not suggest that they are deterritorialized as such, but rather their territorialization is no longer only at the edge; that their meanings become displaced and internalized in public imagination, becoming sites of abject danger that need to be monitored constantly. As it is mediated, the idea of the border reproduces tropes of the frontier as “the line between civilization and barbarism” following Frederick Jackson Turner’s late 19th-century essay on the subject. Turner’s frontier thesis rested upon nostalgia, and this is perhaps what gave it an enduring legacy. As the frontier was “closed” by the end of the 19th century, Turner argued that the defining chapter of American history was forever lost. The violence of this operation, which is glossed over in popular histories of European settlement, was put forward by Turner as a transformational moment in the creation of a national consciousness. However, frontier narratives persisted throughout the 20th century, reproduced in times of crisis to garner popular support.13 And frontier sensibilities—which have been historicized as a generalized edge condition, an ongoing state of war against nature or indigenous peoples—underwrite contemporary ideas of American exceptionalism that fuel the great battles of alterity of the 21st century, naming militant Islam as the enemy. We know the story all too well, but what is less considered is how frontier sensibilities are envisioned, how in the contemporary configuration of the “homeland” we might see an analogue to the “homestead,” the frontier settlement that has become the originary model for American society which has been reimagined through Homeland Security’s 21st-century geopolitics. This generalized edge condition is not limited to the geographic peripheries of the United States: the border’s multiple sites are centralized in a technologized frontier imaginary which has generated new forms of visuality that owe as much to 19th-century frontier sensibilities as to contemporary, crowd-sourced mobile media. Frontier sensibilities foster a sense of vigilance, thus border watching has become a popular trend in this context, a new kind of American spectator sport where heightened vigilance and military preparedness have become part of everyday life in the homeland.

Warrior Citizens and Vigilant Subjects: Multiplying the Frontier “If you see something, say something.” This was the Department of Homeland Security’s campaign that appeared on back-lit signs around shopping malls and airports between 2010 and 2014. It seemed to follow the now-defunct five-color Homeland Security Advisory System which never went below orange. The more recent campaign asked you to be on

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guard, suspicious and prepared: in one of many variations, the slogan “if you see something, say something” is printed in bold over an image of a young woman’s face. She is characteristically pretty and vaguely “ethnic,” her large eyes conveying a sense of urgency. Her cell phone is pressed to her ear in a demonstration of how we can easily report our own paranoid thoughts on a whim (Figure 2.1). There were billboards too: these appeared along interstate highways asking more directly if you are prepared for emergency, the Homeland Security logo placed centrally as the only image on the sign. This kind of public announcement campaign was reminiscent of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” motivational posters that were designed by the British Ministry of Information in 1939 and reproduced as a popular slogan over the last decade on all manner of home decor. Unlike the British wartime posters, Homeland Security’s wartime campaign is premised on hypervigilance and a more diffuse sense of what invasion might mean. As threats to the homeland are potentially everywhere and less easily seen—clandestine migration or networked “terror”, for example—the metaphorical eyes of the nation multiply. Louise Amoore refers to the “vigilant visualities” that have emerged as a

Figure 2.1 Department of Homeland Security advertising campaign, mall kiosk, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2014 (photo: Lee Rodney)

Homeland as Home Front 63 critical component of the “War on Terror,” and the production of watchful subjects through campaigns such as “highway watch” run by the American Trucking Association.14 Similarly, Nicholas Mirzoeff writes of a “post-panoptic” complex of visuality following the logic of Deleuze’s “society of control,” one which aims to separate a “host population” from the insurgent.15 This post-panoptic visuality is equally at work on home territory where participatory vigilance is encouraged as a form of everyday anti-terrorist behavior. These new forms of visuality have been steadily cultivated in the last 15 years. During this time, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have expanded their ranks as the entire nation has been encouraged to be on guard. CBP occupy an interesting place in the reconfiguration of the homeland, and the tensions between local politics and national interests play out in unexpected ways, as I discuss in Chapters 3 and 7. From 2006 onwards CBP began recruitment campaigns for new agents just as the recession set in after 2008. Billboards advertising careers in the Border Patrol were a common sight throughout the American southwest during this time. The Border Patrol also undertook re-branding exercises, raising popular awareness through NASCAR sponsorship and the production of trinkets that functioned as Border Patrol “bling”: hats, T-shirts and mugs as well as a children’s coloring book that is freely available online.16 Of all these publicity campaigns, the coloring book was perhaps the most telling. It featured one of the Border Patrol’s dogs, a German shepherd that was geared to children as a “Lassie”-type pet working alongside agents in the ongoing War on Drugs, alerting them to the dangers of contraband smuggling into the US. In the coloring book, there is no reference to migration from Mexico or international terror. The drug war is the first narrative sold to children and Border Patrol agents are typecast as heroes aided by friendly dogs and helicopters. Customs and Border Patrol agents have become guardians of the frontier, central to the operations of the nation state in the 21st century. They are also as likely to appear as the security apparatus at the Superbowl as they are on the border itself. Despite the augmented role of CBP and Homeland Security, policing and surveillance are not exclusively state operations or top-down coordinated programs of McCarthyist paranoia. As a form of civil defense, the increased status of the border patrol has grown as other forms of popular policing have emerged in the form of “anti-government” patriot groups. While groups like Jim Gilchrest’s “Minuteman Project” seem to be sputtering on after internal legal battles, there has been an increasing trend toward participatory vigilance as a driving preoccupation of many of these patriot organizations.17 The growing antipathy toward immigration on the far right has been coupled with border paranoia. And the enthusiasm toward the Border Patrol also comes with the idea that no amount of security or border agents could ever be equivalent to the threat posed by the nation’s

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peripheries and other vulnerable areas of the homeland. The self-appointed warrior-citizens who volunteer to augment border security may seem like a fringe element of American culture, but they effectively reproduce frontier fantasies as a variant of participatory culture: the “do-it-yourself” policing of militias offers a means of self-realization as self-reliance. The weaponized, pioneer subject of these patriot groups has become part of an expanded “military-industrial-entertainment complex” where surveillance sites function as forms of infotainment.18 Hypervigilance and emergency preparedness are marketed to a growing pool of prospective recruits. A 2010 report from the Southern Poverty Law Centre claims that there has been a sharp rise in extremist groups since Obama’s election in 2009, which saw the number of patriot groups rise from 147 in 2006 to 512 in 2009. Additionally, the report cites an 80 percent rise in hardline antiimmigration groups.19 The Minuteman Project, a form of border patrol theatre that emerged in 2005, is most active in the American southwest, though chapters have emerged along the northern border with Canada, in Maine, Vermont and Michigan. The Minutemen camp out along remote parts of the US–Mexico border and report suspicious activity to CBP, though they have often overstepped their boundaries. The project has been controversial from the outset and seems to be on the wane. Its short-lived “Operation Normandy” was promoted on their website during the summer of 2014 as the Honduran child refugee crisis was at its height, although it seems to have disappeared as quickly as it was imagined. Scheduled for May 1, 2015, it traded on a loose association with D-day and the invasion of Normandy that is credited with the end of World War II, however its logic was tragically flawed. Gilchrest proposed to attract a patriot army of 3500 volunteers to “occupy” the US–Mexico border in order to “stop an invasion”, but the movement failed to catch on. The Normandy metaphor, as seductive as it was in its moral imperative, failed to work as it placed the “illegal alien” children as the invading allies while the Minutemen could only play the role of the Nazis as the occupying force at the edge of the continent. Gilchrest’s mixed metaphors aside, the Minutemen’s sense of a generalized border war between Mexico and the United States, takes its cue from a neo-colonial relationship that the US has fostered with Latin America, as well as the dynamics of counterinsurgency, where the insurgent (guerrilla) must be located within the general population, isolated and targeted. For the Minutemen and other groups, the border’s multiple sites have become a theatre of potential military operations where migrants are cast in the guise of stealth invaders that require watchful citizens to keep an eye on the border as a shifting field of vision. The Frontiersmen, an American militia that emerged in 2009, may be more indicative of the current direction of the patriot movement. Unlike the Minuteman Project, whose focus was squarely on US land borders, the

Homeland as Home Front 65 Frontiersmen concentrate their efforts on more generalized threats to the social body: “any natural, man-made, or economic crisis that would threaten our safety, our homes, or our way of life.” The Frontiersmen take their name from an earlier British organization, the Legion of Frontiersmen, which was a loose association of Commonwealth patriots founded in the early years of the 20th century. Like their British counterparts, these new American Frontiersmen are galvanized by the spirit of the frontier and an ethos of vigilance. Unlike the historical legion, however, their contemporaries distinguish themselves by a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all disaster management strategy, a national network and a well-organized website that chronicles their activities. Their charter promises prospective members the opportunity to transform “from peaceful citizen, to warrior citizen”.20 The Frontiersmen website reads like an amped-up version of neighborhood watch, encouraging participatory surveillance through links to 14 external websites that monitor everything from Washington, DC traffic cameras, to NASA’s “All Sky Fireball Network” and a “3D Nuke Map” (curiously missing from the lineup of real-time disaster-monitoring tools are links to climate change models as the threat may be both too real and too vague). The Frontiersmen’s relationship to disaster scenarios is one that is specifically curated and perceptually managed to promote a heightened sense of an apocalyptic horizon reminiscent of the end of the Cold War. While the Frontiersmen’s site does not overtly trade in hate speech or white suprematism, its emphasis on vigilance, fear and disaster preparation promotes a specific form of white masculinity that echoes familiar rhetoric from the late 19th-century frontier ideal of survival, selfreliance and an acquisitive relationship to territory and resources. The original Legion of Frontiersmen was a somewhat anomalous paramilitary force founded during peacetime at the twilight of the British Empire just prior to World War I. Founded in 1905 by Boer War veteran, Roger Pocock, the organization sought to “prepare patriots for war and foster vigilance during peacetime.” But what is most interesting about this short-lived legion is the degree to which it drew its inspiration for survivalist skills from frontier narratives of the 19th century. In an odd amalgamation of outlaw American frontier legends and English Romantic poetry, Roger Pocock crafted a modern vigilante organization that has been variously credited with the development of 20th-century intelligence gathering as well as an important precursor to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts. Pocock advocated on behalf of a “lost legion” of Commonwealth officers who could protect a sightless and “blind” Empire. At its height, the Legion of Frontiersmen claimed to have ten thousand members worldwide. This connection between an expansive overseas empire as a British frontier and a patriotic desire to oversee and protect from the periphery suggests parallels with contemporary border vigilance in an American context. For his part, Pocock sought to protect the British homeland from German

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invasion. Writing in his memoirs, he claimed: “Our countrymen saw no danger, and that was because the Empire had no eyesight. . . . How could I furnish sight to the blind Empire?”21 If the Edwardian Frontiersmen were preoccupied with seeing things on the periphery that their fellow countrymen could not see, if they derived their moral obligation be the eyes of an Empire for the British imperial globe it was through a form of “imperialist visuality” that they derived their power. Mirzoeff connects a 19th-century imperialist “complex” of visuality to the control and maintenance of a far-flung colonial environment, one where culture “became the key to imagining relations of colonial centers and peripheries as visualized by the colonizers.”22 The contemporary American Frontiersmen, like their earlier British counterparts, share in the critical distinction between a homeland and a remote periphery that is mysterious and vaguely understood. However, the difference between the 19th-century colonial and imperialist forms of visuality apparent in the British Legion of Frontiersmen, and the neo-colonial formations of the 21st-century visuality apparent in the American Frontiersmen’s network can be seen through the lens of “counterinsurgency” as a late 20th-century phenomenon that continues into the present. Mirzoeff correlates post-panoptical modes of control and visualization with the end of the Cold War as the revolution in military affairs promoted digital technologies and virtual warfare by the early 1990s. Key components of this shift include counterinsurgency as a form of cultural warfare, where participation in the identification of the insurgent serves as an important behavioral modality in American culture; additionally, the theatre of surveillance operations is extended from a specific place or nation to “the entire planet.”23 While vigilante groups such as the American Frontiersmen might seem distant from the operations of the Department of Homeland Security, particularly in terms of their stated anti-government ethos, they seem to embody and normalize (in the Foucauldian sense) many of the ideas of counterinsurgency in their patriotic enthusiasm for remote surveillance and emergency preparedness.

The Pastoral, the Police and the Homeland Currently, there are at least two competing ideas of the homeland. The first is the geopolitical and extraterritorial idea of the American homeland as extended to the globe or the planet,24 while the second takes shape as a domestic, protectionist impulse toward the integrity of the homeland as a bounded entity. Both ideas are critical to understanding the increased role of the border in general and CBP agents more specifically. Whether the homeland refers to an expanded or contracted territory, it is intimately tied to the idea of the frontier in American culture. As the frontier became symbolic during the 20th century, the border became institutionalized

Homeland as Home Front 67 within the triad of security, territory, population that Michel Foucault identifies in his lectures on governmentality. These lectures provide a vital framework to consider the border’s emergence and evolution, from the conditioning of border-crossing subjects in the 1920s and 1930s to the expanding array of surveillance techniques and biometric identification in the early part of the 21st century as the border and the homeland have come to overtake the lexicon of the frontier. For his part, Foucault describes governmentality as an “ugly” word but insists that governing is far from self-apparent; while its methods are considered scientific (statistics among them), he suggests that governing is an art not a science and that its techniques are distinct from reigning, ruling or commanding.25 Foucault speaks of the rise of governmentality and its concern with population which stems from his description of what he names pastoral power. Foucault’s description of pastoral power bears consideration in light of the ongoing War on Terror, particularly as it applies to the branding of the homeland in both security discourse and entertainment television. Foucault invokes the metaphor of the shepherd as the basis for the modern conception of governmentality where power is exercised over a population through vigilance and protectionism. He distinguishes pastoral power from territorial control, which he attributes to Greek thought as functioning intra muros, at the walled periphery of a town or a state. By contrast, pastoral power begins in Hebrew tradition, finding its way into the Christian West by the colonial period. Much like the idea of the frontier, it is characterized by its “zeal, devotion and endless application.” Operating as a guiding, mobile and watchful mode of power, the pastoral is “exercised on a multiplicity rather than on a territory.”26 In the exercise of pastoral power, we might see the workings of the frontier, which is less about a specific space than a watchful mode that governs its subjects through vigilance. Pastoral power is roaming and mobile rather than territorially bound, but Foucault also notes that this mode of power, in spite of its benevolent associations, has been the bloodiest and most violent in the history of civilization. However, Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power as an overseeing, topdown modality of power, overlooks the slower emergence of how and where the territorial lines acquire meaning and in what ways they do. It also overlooks how these lines have come to command the significance that they do now as international borders (continually in need of increased fortification) and why they have come to be understood as an object of reverence at one extreme, or as a “hegemonic force” that needs to be overthrown on the other end of the spectrum. Opposing perspectives on border control are manifest as vigilante groups, such as the Minutemen or the Frontiersmen on the one hand, or through anti-border organizations such as the European No-Border Network, on the other. In either case, on the right and on the left borders have become naturalized or immutable. To say that the border has become, following one of Rancière’s key

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concepts, a “distribution of the sensible” seems both self-evident and mundane. But it is also to draw out the aesthetic and ontological dimensions of a concept that appears as an incontestable artifact of political history. The borderline itself orders and arranges perceptually the “properties—resemblances and differences” of either side through the act of division.27 The borderline primarily works to create a specific distribution of the sensible (a here and there, a them and us) that must be seen and commonly understood in order to be effective. While the state sponsored the 19thcentury surveys (as discussed in Chapter 1), the perception and understanding of the borderline’s effects did not take place immediately or evenly, building only through specific moments of crisis (seen through immigration, labor or trade issues) over the last century and a half. These crises were frequently followed by institutional change. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1875 or creation of the Border Patrol in the 1920s are some of these early moments. But the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security is perhaps one of the largest institutional shifts in the history of American borders. These institutional shifts can be seen through the French concept of “la police” which both Foucault and Rancière take up in different ways. For his part, Rancière describes the police not as an institution of power, but as a much more elementary concept: “its essence lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible.” Elaborated upon, this partition is understood doubly as “that which separates and excludes [and] on the other that which allows participation.” The police is a “symbolic constitution of the social” one determined in sensory experience.28 Vigilante groups such as the Minutemen and the Frontiersmen exemplify a central conundrum of neoliberal consensus democracy in performing a policing function to “defend freedom” as tied up in an American context of liberty and democracy. The “Border Patrol Nation” that Todd Miller speaks of, and the militia groups motivated by civilian policing, seem to define freedom solely through the right to fight, the right to self-defense as personal achievement. Paradoxically, freedom as the American mantra of democracy seems to drift further away in a highly militarized culture. And chasing after freedom with vague and generalized border wars, both in the creation of a homeland and in “extra-territorial” sites of conflict and incarceration falls in line with what Rancière describes as the police. As it has established over the past 150 years, the border, like Rancière’s police “designates not an institution of power, but a distribution of the sensible within which it becomes possible to define strategies and techniques of power.”29 Thus, the police is not the Border Patrol or the RCMP as policing institutions, nor is it the Prevention through Deterrence Program (1994) or the Secure Fence Act (2006), specific border policies that I discuss in Chapter 5. The police is more of an ontological function that sanctions these defenses and expenditures. Rancière’s insistence on the sensory distinguishes his thought from Foucault’s whose writings

Homeland as Home Front 69 on governmentality and biopower have come to define a contemporary understanding of territory and the role of borders in the 21st century. But Foucault and Rancière are not necessarily at odds with one another: rather it seems that Rancière’s work stems from Foucault’s late work and his understanding of the police as polity. Moreover, it would be difficult to comprehend Rancière’s “police” without a Foucauldian syntax, even though their writings on power and agency differ in fundamental ways. After Foucault’s relatively lucid lectures on governmentality, Rancière’s work on the aesthetics of politics seems terse and remote. But reading them in tandem enables a more nuanced understanding of the various roles of borders and frontiers within shifting concepts of territory that have been articulated in recent years, from the fascination with “deterritorialization” that characterized the reception of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus (which became somewhat of a catchphrase for describing the spatial logic of globalization) to Foucault’s biopolitics. The relationship between the frontier and the border might profitably be seen in the distinction between Foucault’s pastoral power, which is at work in the idea of the frontier, and Rancière’s police which is manifest in the border as a specific distribution of the sensible and more akin to a territorial frame. While the border seems to exercise direct power over us, it is the frontier as a form of pastoral power that in turn governs the border, informing its logic. The border has come to embody the violence of the frontier and this has become more evident in recent years as the idea of the homeland has entered this lexicon of interrelated terms.

Terror Television and Territorial Malaise The vigilant gaze of the homeland-as-frontier is also evident in a range of recent television productions and films. The plethora of border-related television dramas emerging since 2006 have all focused on a dialectic of vision and visuality: spectacular violence unfolding within familiar settings or suspected threats in uncanny locations. If the line between entertainment and policing behaviors has become blurred in organizations such as the Frontiersmen and the Minutemen, it is also possible to trace a connection between the widespread enthusiasm for border vigilance and the array of border-related television that has emerged over the last decade. While the term “terror television” emerged in the late 1970s in relation to horror shows, it has taken on a different cast in recent years as an increasingly recognizable genre of entertainment television related to global security and intelligence gathering.30 While not all of it directly references the border, a good portion of it does. Within the last decade, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series The Border, Fox 21’s 24 and Homeland, along with the National Geographic Channel series Border Wars have all run with varying degrees of popular success. Of these shows, the series Homeland has garnered critical acclaim. While several episodes

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take the main character Carrie (played by Claire Danes) to Islamabad and other locations in the Middle East, much of the drama is set within the continental US in East Coast suburban locations. Thus, it is a predominately white middle-America that sets the stage for the homeland in the series as a familiar setting that has been breached and infiltrated by Islamic insurgents whose presence is felt but not necessarily seen. These television shows serve to blur the border between the nation’s interior and exterior, and the line between ally and enemy. Within these contexts the idea of the homeland and its increasing fortification seems to have a paradoxical or inverse relationship to the sense of peace and safety inside. Here the uncanny, which stems from the German das Unheimliche (unhomed or unhomely) is operative within the idea of the homeland. It should be noted that the uncanny is not full-blown terror, rather it is a pervasive sense of foreboding or dread. Thus, the idea of the homeland is a precarious construction that rests on insecurity to maintain its power, and the relationship between the homeland and the border is porous and dynamic. Amy Kaplan suggests that, despite appearances, the concept of the homeland functions through insecurity. If the Department of Homeland Security offers the promise of domestic safety, it can do so only if the idea of the homeland is understood to be under siege: Although homeland security may strive to cordon off the nation as a domestic space free from external foreign threats, it is actually about breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, about seeing the homeland in a state of constant emergency from threats within and without.31 This integral relationship between the homeland and its boundaries is also explored in the short-lived television series The Bridge set between El Paso and Juárez. The first season tracked a transborder serial killer, implicating in the process both the Mexican Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in collusion and corruption. The most interesting aspect of the show is that it at least partially disrupts the narrative of Juárez and El Paso as a pair of urban opposites: Juárez among the world’s most violent cities and El Paso as one of America’s safest cities (the flawed presumption here is, of course, that American cities are already among the world’s safest, which, depending upon metrics, is largely not the case). In The Bridge, unlike the common media narrative, the violence of Juárez as the epicenter of drug cartel violence and clandestine migration networks is somewhat displaced and linked directly to El Paso as the other side, where the placid suburban world of Starbucks and horse ranches in the region becomes the backdrop for forms of torture, brutality and death that have largely been shunted offshore or outside American borders in film and television (to Mexico and Latin America, but also Afghanistan and Guantánamo). The Bridge, by contrast, implicates the role of the US in border violence that is normally

Homeland as Home Front 71 attributed to Mexico’s internal disorganization. The Bridge of the Americas that connects the two cities serves as the site of a dramatic forensic investigation that opens the series (the crime originating in the US and headed through Mexico). The series locates more than half of the crime in the El Paso region, squarely on American territory with actors that complete the web of underground economies that are often portrayed as operating exclusively outside American territory. But the graphic nature of the opening crime scene, which features a female body cleaved in two and mysteriously deposited precisely on the line between the United States and Mexico, is unlike any scenario depicted in other border crime dramas. If this dismembered and divided body was not visceral enough, it is later revealed that the top and bottom half belong to two different victims, one American, the other Mexican. Thus, the border is conceptually implicated on a number of levels, from the juridical (which state claims responsibility to the investigation) to the bodily (where the victim’s remains are reassembled to confuse the investigators). As a series, The Bridge takes up one of the most difficult chapters of border crime, the femicides in Juárez, which are not named as such initially, but are clearly the founding subject of the crime drama. Like Danes’ character in Homeland, the lead detective in The Bridge is also a freewheeling blonde, but both are distinguished by their uncanny intelligence as a result of mental disability: bipolar disorder in Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and autism in Sonya Cross (Diane Kruger). While both Danes and Kruger represent a kind of all-American norm of stereotypical beauty, their mental conditions enable them to occupy a place of extraordinary vision that transcends the comfort of the homeland. Thus both female characters are positioned as clairvoyant women capable of seeing what their male peers cannot. The gendering of the border in The Bridge, however, goes much further and its implication as a site of sexual violence calls up two disparate, though well-known concepts about geographic boundaries. In 1892, the German geographer and ethnographer, Friedrich Ratzel, wrote of the idea of the border in terms of its role “as the skin of the nation.” Ratzel’s views reflected an emergent body politic of the nation state in the 19th and early 20th centuries when it was presumed that well defined and “good” borders provided the necessary conditions for the national or imperial state to evolve. Ratzel saw the state as a “living organism” following a “geo-determinist” model derived from 19th-century Darwinism.32 While this geo-determinist view fell out of favor, the embodied idea of the nation state and its peripheries has continued to provide a lasting and powerful metaphor. Where Ratzel wrote at the end of the 19th century, Gloria Anzaldúa would write of the borderlands as an open wound and a zone of hemorrhage nearly a century later in her classic text, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Where the homeland functions as the nation’s uncanny interior, unstable and in need of protection, the border as periphery has been portrayed as a

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zone of terror and monstrous alterity in many television productions. Although these ideas of the border as the skin-like interface between the nation’s inside and outside have been in play for some time, they have been spectacularized and exaggerated within entertainment contexts. In The Bridge the border returns to the ungovernable state of the frontier, a space where subliminal forces are at work that defy the technological control of surveillance. Where the border imposes a geometry of control it does so through techniques of perspective, providing a national horizon line of territorial determination and demarcation. These mapping techniques and their relationship to the modern nation state have been overtaken by the framework of counterinsurgency where “post-perspectival” forms of representation predominate, from remote-controlled drone warfare to leaked videos and other information breaches. This distant and random feed of image as information combines to form a paradoxical and chaotic representation of space. Mirzoeff connects counterinsurgency with these post-perspectival modes of visuality and emphasizes Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” as a borderless “zone of indifference.” He writes: When counterinsurgency deploys itself as a visualized field, it does so by means of what one might call post-perspectival means of representation. Perspective defines the place of representation, whereas the state of exception is a nonplace.33 In weaving together ideas from Giorgio Agamben, Marc Augé and Jacques Rancière within a theory of the visuality of counterinsurgency, Mirzoeff attempts a radical revision of the role of perspective and surveillance within a global sphere. To look at the border through a post-perspectival lens is to recognize how it is portrayed as a site of brutality and violence, which is precisely how the Mexico–US border is positioned in the 21st century. Whereas perspective requires distance and a horizon line, tools that were employed in the 19th-century establishment of the border, we are now brought in too close to the “zone of indifference” that the border has become in a mediatized context. The confusion between interior and exterior thus sustains and exaggerates both a sense of paranoia about the border itself and a false nostalgia about the idea of the homeland. Thus, as concepts the border and the homeland work in tandem with each other, one reinforcing the importance of the other. At the same time, the two concepts also work on multiple levels to trouble the ideas of territory and security, the very ideas that the homeland and the border would seem to protect and insure.

Notes 1 The series has also been critically received as an antidote to the controversy that ensued around torture as interrogation in the TV series 24. See Kumar

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2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

and Kundnani, note 3 below, and Elizabeth Rubin, “All Eyes on Claire,” Vogue, August 2013, 54. Sarah A. Matheson, “Television, Nation and National Security: CBC’s The Border,” in Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup (Eds.), Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada–US Border (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 71. Deepa Kumar and Arun Kundnani, “Homeland and the Imagination of National Security,”, Jacobin, November 13, 2013. Accessed December 2, 2014 at: www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/homeland-and-the-imagination-ofnational-security Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 42. Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxix. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “War is Culture: Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality and the Petraeus Doctrine,” PMLA, 124: 5, (2009) 1737–1746, 1737. Ackleson, “Border Security in Risk Society.” Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review, 85 (2003): 82–93, 89. Elden, Terror and Territory, 14. Étienne Balibar, “Europe as Borderland,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27: 2 (2009): 190–215; Didier Bigo, “The Möbius Ribbon of International Security(ies),” in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson and Yosef Lapid (Eds.), Identities, Orders and Borders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Balibar, “Europe as Borderland,” 195. Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 120. Louise Amoore, “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror,” Security Dialogue, 38: 2 (2007): 215–232, 230. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 279. The coloring book was initially issued by the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas. It is available at: www.publiccollectors.org/BorderPatrol.pdf Tim Murphy, “The Meltdown of Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia,” Mother Jones, August 4, 2014. Accessed December 31, 2014 at: www. motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/minuteman-movement-border-crisis-simcox; Mark Berman, “The Current State of White Supremacist Groups in the US,” Washington Post, December 30, 2014. Accessed December 30, 2014 at: www. washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/12/30/the-current-state-ofwhite-supremacist-groups-in-the-u-s Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 20. Alex Hannaford, “The Truth behind America’s Civilian Militias,” Telegraph, August 19, 2010. Accessed November 17, 2014 at: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/northamerica/usa/7944563/The-truth-behind-Americas-civilianmilitias.html Accessed July 29, 2016 at: www.thefrontiersmen.org/pdf/charter.pdf

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21 Michael Humphries, “The Eyes of an Empire: The Legion of Frontiersmen, 1904–14,” Historical Research, 85: 227 (2012): 133–158, 140. 22 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 15. 23 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 293. 24 Elden, Terror and Territory, 25. 25 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 115. 26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 126. 27 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 92. 28 Rancière, Dissensus, 36. 29 Rancière, Dissensus, 95. 30 See William G. Little, “24: Time, Terror, Television,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 42: 1(2014): 2–15. 31 Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 90. 32 Alan K. Henrikson, “Border Regions as Neighbourhoods,” in Doris WastlWalter (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 86. 33 Mirzoeff, “War is Culture,” 11.

Part II

Mobile Frontiers

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3

Exhibiting the Frontier Thresholds and Checkpoints as Museological Projects

In 2006, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) organized Thresholds Along the Frontier: Contemporary Border Stations, a touring exhibition of architectural models for thirteen new border stations at crossings along the Canada–US border and the Mexico–US Border. Funded by the Department of Homeland Security as a part of their multi-billion-dollar border upgrades, the GSA was charged with presenting a friendly face for the contemporary US border after mass confusion, frustration and delays at US ports of entry in the years following the events of 9/11. Thresholds along the Frontier was a modest exhibition that reached only two of its four scheduled venues. But its timing was critical, appearing as a positive official statement about American borders at a time when the 2001 PATRIOT Act had begun to negatively impact travel through airports and across land borders. The exhibition did not address the institutional shift in border security or its effect on travellers: the litany of accounts of confiscated perfume bottles and toenail clippers, or the gratuitous strip searches, misidentifications and detainments, even though these accounts were heard often and signaled a schism between the travelling public and the institutional goals of the Department of Homeland Security. Against the culture of complaint that had been emerging around the border, Thresholds Along the Frontier focused on the image of an ideal border, one that is safe, pleasant and efficient. Although the exhibition proposed architectural solutions to the issues arising from increased border security, it seemed divorced from the physical sites of the crossings themselves, which had become slower, thicker and more complex after 2001. But what was most curious about the exhibition was its title which alluded to abstractions: the liminal space of a threshold coupled with the popular notion of the frontier, a concept that has all but vanished from contemporary discourse on borders. Thresholds Along the Frontier was foremost an exercise in what Kristin Ross has identified as “perception management,” a strategy put in place by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s to promote domestic support for American intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua.1 While perception management has become standard procedure, well refined since the

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Reagan administration, it is arguably linked to what Joseph Nye has called “soft power” or “smart power,” strategies to influence public opinion domestically or internationally. Jacques Rancière frames these ideas from the opposite perspective, regarding the work of soft power or perception management as part of a specific “distribution of the sensible” that defines what can be seen, heard and said. Rancière links these strategies to contemporary forms of enforced consensus that work to limit social and political issues to a single reality through creating a “topography of the visual” to frame and shape a common political stage.2 While news media are easily called to task for their partisan viewpoints, selective framing and massaging of appearances, museums and exhibitions are less frequently under scrutiny in the same way. Exhibitions, while often controversial, generally don’t reach large audiences at once; their impact is softened by the relatively long duration of viewing a series of images, objects and artifacts. They work to naturalize concepts in ways that have come to seem beyond question, expressing ideas in modes that are conventionally identified with truth and objectivity. Thresholds Along the Frontier served in this way as an invitation to ponder the formality of the border when there is nothing up for discussion. The exhibition was a truncated and speculative exercise that conjured the magnificence of the historical frontier in the mundane context of border stations, which are generally places for waiting and interrogation. It was a strange interlude in contemporary discussions about borders, but the exhibition’s title implicitly posed an important question without actually addressing it: what is the conceptual distinction between a border and a frontier in the 21st century? National borders are not merely maintained by the mutual understanding of a geographic survey, or by the military presence of border patrol and border walls, however imposing. They also need to be sustained by a variety of conceptual methods that add dimension and give weight to a boundary survey by making the demarcation significant. This is especially the case for American territorial borders which have undergone a significant transformation in the 21st century, a transformation that has been brought on by a crisis of meaning around the physical boundaries of the United States. This chapter looks specifically at ways in which borders have been exhibited in museological contexts and how their artifacts are curated to naturalize the ideological presumptions behind their rise or fall. In looking to contemporary examples of border exhibitions in Germany and the United States, I aim to trace some of the changes in border narratives globally as they have emerged after 1989 and 2001 respectively, and how these exhibits serve to reinforce the political constructions that they represent. While these exhibition projects strive to create (or recreate) the geopolitical conditions of the borders that they reference, these museums appear very different in orientation and worldview. But these differences point to the

Exhibiting the Frontier 79 conflicting narratives that borders engender in our contemporary world as well as the diverse processes at work that contribute to their meaning. The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, are private museums with collections that were acquired and maintained by the idiosyncratic vision of their founders. These two institutions present competing ideas about borders as frontiers and they are both popular tourist attractions that regularly host organized tour groups of seniors and schoolchildren. As different as these memorial museums are in context and worldview, they share the odd, eccentric qualities of independent museum practice that range from adapted buildings and inexplicable curatorial juxtapositions, to faded text panels and crowded, makeshift display strategies: qualities that make them unique and compelling. Though they represent proWestern, neoliberal ideas about “freedom”, these private institutions form an interesting counterpoint to the official exhibitions on borders organized by national agencies in their corresponding countries: the General Services Administration’s Thresholds Along the Frontier and the Berlin Wall historic site and documentation center in Berlin. In 1991, Benedict Anderson extended his classic study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism to include a chapter on the centrality of three institutions to the development of a colonial grammar, noting the relationship between the census, the map and the museum in shaping and organizing the colonial imagination. In his analysis, these institutions worked to enable a bounded and determinate picture, a grid that produced a binary logic that divided and distributed, serving to define what belonged and what didn’t. As classification systems, the map, census and museum were not abandoned with decolonization and independence, but rather were strengthened as symbols of nationalism, creating an “historical depth of field that was easily inherited by the state’s postcolonial successor.”3 The historical connection that Anderson draws between these three 19th-century institutions is one that lies at the foundation of the exhibitions and museums considered here. While the census, map and border form an interlinked representational structure that quantitatively defines the nation state, it is rare that this intersects directly with role of the museum, which is more symbolic. This historicization of the geographic boundary as something worthy of museological presentation marks a shift in the ways that borders are conceptualized and presented to the public. While borders can be regarded as both architectural and cultural phenomena or as displays of military history, the shift can be seen in competing ideas about what borders are supposed to do and which ideologies they stand for. The Mauermuseum in Berlin and the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso mark the distance between the celebratory moment of un-bordering in 1989 and the remaking of borders after 2001.

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The Border Patrol Museum: Reviving the Frontier The Border Patrol Museum is set in the rolling hills of West Texas on the outskirts of El Paso, the American city that shares an international border with Juárez, Mexico.4 While El Paso bills itself as one of America’s safest cities, Juárez was branded in 2008 as one of the world’s most dangerous, after Felipe Calderón brought in the Mexican Army to contain drug cartel violence that had been building over control of cross-border routes to access lucrative US markets.5 But the military presence on the Mexican side has only exacerbated violence as loyalties continuously shift between the municipal police, the Mexican Army and the cartels, whose members move rather fluidly between legitimate and illegitimate organizations. At the same time, El Paso, a mere stone’s throw across the border, remains eerily quiet. Despite concerns about “spillover violence” pouring into the southern US from Mexico’s troubled northern states, El Paso has defied logic in prospering against the odds of the current economic recession and in spite of its neighbor’s issues.6 Many Americans would like to credit the swelling ranks of the Department of Homeland Security and its subsidiary, Customs and Border Patrol, for the disparity between El Paso’s extraordinary safety record and Juárez’s extraordinary violence. As the largest reorganization in American government in 50 years, the Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002 and has spent billions fortifying American borders over the last decade.7 Recent studies demonstrate that the decline in apprehensions of undocumented migrants and drug arrests at the El Paso border are more likely to be attributable to the downturn in the US economy than to the increased security at the border. The predicted “spillover” of both economic migrants and drug violence seems to be a popular fear-mongering tactic used by American politicians who promote these new fortifications to win votes.8 El Paso has always been a flashpoint for US–Mexico relations, from the Mexican Revolution onward. The El Paso sector was established in 1924, along with the Detroit sector, as one of the first two official bordercrossing points on the northern and southern borders of the United States, and the first training school for border patrol was established there in 1920. But the historic circumstances of El Paso del Norte as a frontier post have established this site as a significant location for this museum. In contrast with the technologically sophisticated image promoted by the 21st-century “smart border” programs established by the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol Museum memorializes a version from the early 20th century, taking its cue from Hollywood visions of the American frontier. A 50-foot steel sculpture of a border marshal on horseback marks the entrance from the roadside. Against the backdrop of the desert landscape, the sculpture takes on a cinematic cast, like a promotional still from the climax of a John Ford or John Sturges western (Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Border Patrol Museum, El Paso, Texas, 2008 (photo: Lee Rodney)

The Border Patrol Museum’s sign is more modest, but continues the western theme with its stone foundation and cartoonish, yellow lettering painted on a rustic wooden backdrop (Figure 3.2). Combined, these elements conjure up a generalized frontier narrative, one that links a golden age of border patrol directly to the mythic, expansionist ethos of the American west and its implicit logic of ownership and control extracted out of manifest destiny. As the most distinctive elements of the museum’s exterior, the sculpture and road sign act as heraldry as the building itself is an otherwise unremarkable bunker surrounded by a large parking lot. The Border Patrol Museum was founded in 1979 by a group of retired border patrol agents, but the museum did not officially open until 1985, moving into its current premises on the outskirts of El Paso in 1994. Although there have been significant federal budget increases directed toward the expansion of Customs and Border Patrol in the last decade, the Border Patrol Museum seems to have shunned the largesse.9 Its premises and collection illustrate a sense of its limited financial resources, but this may be by design as the institution distances itself from official government operations. Reflecting the political slant of West Texas, the Border Patrol Museum is essentially a conservative organization, but it

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Figure 3.2 Border Patrol Museum sign, El Paso, Texas, 2008 (photo: Lee Rodney)

conveys a strange, almost contradictory mix of American patriotism and libertarianism, announcing its self-sufficiency, independence and debt-free status. The Museum proudly advertises that it was “built and supported by your donations” and the website and donation box remind visitors that donations are “cheerfully accepted” and those of $200 or more qualify to be part of the Wall of Support, an installation that runs along two interior walls within the main exhibition hall.10 Perhaps the most contentious installation within the museum, the Wall of Support, is ironic in the context of Texan politics (see Figure 3.3). The state is known for its opposition to the construction of the border wall along the US–Mexico boundary, as many ranchers have property that straddles the borderline.11 Additionally, Texas has always clung to its historical identity as an independent state. In this context, the Wall of Support serves as more than just a donors’ wall, it stands as an implicit statement in favor of wall construction as debate flared over the 2006 Secure Fence Act implying that walls strengthen the nation rather than signifying weakness or structural problems. While numerous arguments have been made to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of wall building to deter immigrants, contraband or international terrorism, the popularity of walling as a viable security strategy continues to grow. Wendy Brown argues that the recent

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Figure 3.3 Border Patrol Museum, Wall of Support, El Paso, Texas, 2008 (photo: Lee Rodney)

global trend toward wall building is a sign of “waning sovereignty” or the detachment of sovereignty from the nation state. Brown sees these new walls as theatrical expressions of insecurity, becoming “icons of the erosion of state sovereignty” within a globalized world. Although they appear as “hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty” she indicates that they also paradoxically mask the state’s instability and the reduction of state power.12 Within this context of waning sovereignty, one might ask how the role of the Border Patrol has shifted, becoming at once more central and also more routine. Customs and Border Patrol has always been a state agency, only recently falling under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, where it has significantly expanded and risen in stature. However, the history presented through the Border Patrol Museum bears no mark of this recent political shift and presents the history of the US Border Patrol as a kind of quasi-independent frontier force that owes nothing to big government in Washington. At the same time, the museum doubles as a US Border Patrol recruitment center where one can fill out an application for a career in the Border Patrol service. In line with right-wing distrust toward the role of federal government, the Museum displays its distance from the state in exhibition strategies which are proudly amateur, in stark contrast with the slick contemporary image presented by the Department

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of Homeland Security as portrayed through their website and other promotional materials such as the General Services Administration’s Thresholds along the Frontier exhibition (which I discuss in further detail at the end of the chapter). One might expect to find an overarching narrative logic in the Border Patrol Museum’s display, but this has been neglected along with professional lighting standards, framing and interpretive panels. Rather, the organizational approach is simple, logical and tidy: photographs and videos to the left of the front door, decommissioned border patrol vehicles to the right. This assortment of vehicles comprises the most esteemed artifacts in the Border Patrol Museum’s collection, recalling popular narratives of highspeed chases and the apprehension of hardened criminals. These include helicopters, speedboats and snowmobiles, all formerly used in patrolling land and maritime borders from the 1920s to the 1980s, which are haphazardly displayed in the main exhibition hall like a display in a high school gymnasium. The lack of museological standards, however, has a certain democratic appeal, as the history of the US Border Patrol is portrayed in the same manner as baseball or other all-American sports displays: photographs of guards from the various border sectors are lined up like teams in a league. The profusion of banners, medals and other memorabilia are all available in replica for purchase, along with coloring books for kids featuring animated patrol dogs. This emphasis on gear and heroes trumps any historical context for the formation of the Border Patrol, which is consistently presented as being as central to the American psyche as NASCAR, and as natural as apple pie. This popular and reassuring image of the border patrol is furthered by the Wall of Support which serves as a theatrical prop, a smallscale stand-in for the vast and impersonal US–Mexico border wall as a big government mega-project, as well as a soapbox to promote fortifications that are for the people and by the people. The Border Patrol Museum treads a fine line between the official concerns of state security and the popularity of vigilante organizations like the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, a national group that has chapters in border states along both the northern and southern boundaries. Although the Museum maintains its independence from government funding, it still functions, indirectly, as a form of “soft power” or “perception management” for the Department of Homeland Security. After its hasty formation in 2002, DHS drew criticism for its lack of transparency in its operations consistent with policies under the 2001 PATRIOT Act that directly affected civil liberties. Although the term “soft power” was coined in the context of conducting international diplomacy (in contrast with the common idea of “hard power” and coercion through military means), it can equally apply to domestic situations, such as garnering public support for the expansion of border security. Joseph Nye sees soft power as the ability “to attract or repel other actors to want what you want.”13 The idea of soft power is hardly news to scholars of 20th-century art history, who have come

Exhibiting the Frontier 85 to see the promotion of Abstract Expressionism in Europe as a kind of softpower narrative operating in the background while the grand narrative of the Cold War played itself out.14 However, Nye’s writings bring these ideas into the mainstream of contemporary American political thought. The Border Patrol Museum functions within this context to popularize border patrol activities and to historicize its security operations as a necessary part of American statehood. The two modes of power, soft and hard, can also be reread in terms of the way that they both frame the border as a specific “distribution of the sensible,” Rancière’s description of how the aesthetics of politics privileges the symbolic over the dialectal, the whole over its constituent parts, placing consensus before dissensus. For him, consensus is not the “agreement of the political parties or social partners on the common interests of the community,” rather, it reconfigures the “visibility of the common” by limiting controversy or dissent and by objectifying situations so that they are no longer open for discussion. Consensus is Rancière’s term for the weakening of contemporary politics, and it is plainly operative in the conventions of museum practice noted by Benedict Anderson and others. The exhibitions considered here work as forms of consensus by presenting all social and political issues in terms of a “single reality.” While Rancière’s description of consensus would seem to describe the propagandistic strategies of authoritarian regimes, he is in fact referring to neoliberal governments of the West which hold open the right to embody contradiction and to suspend democracy in times of emergency, much like the state of exception as a political strategy described in the writings of Giorgio Agamben. But unlike Agamben, Rancière draws our attention to the sensible realm at the base of operations of consensus, which collapses multiple worlds into a singular world. Consensus for him operates primarily through vision by limiting what can be seen and thought. “The consensus says that there is but a single reality whose signs must be depleted; that there is but a single space, while reserving the right to redraw its borders; that one unique time exists, while allowing itself to multiply its figures.”15

Mauermuseum: Spectacle of the American Sector The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie was established by Rainer Hildebrandt, a German historian in 1962, a year after the Berlin Wall was erected. Hildebrandt’s Mauermuseum (wall museum) grew from its original context, a small display in his two-room apartment on Bernauer Strasse in West Berlin (the famous apartment that straddled the border), eventually expanding to accommodate a large collection of escape vehicles donated by East Germans who had successfully fled to the West. The museum moved into its permanent quarters at Checkpoint Charlie in 1963 and took on its present-day configuration in 1987, when it expanded into the first two floors of Peter Eisenman’s partially completed housing project, the Haus am

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Checkpoint Charlie. Eisenman’s project was built around the three remaining pre-war buildings at the site including the Mauermuseum. After the Wall fell in 1989, the Mauermuseum collected the defunct border signs and other Cold War paraphernalia from the divided Germany, including the iconic “YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR” sign. This 50-year-old institution has survived the division and subsequent reunification of Germany due to Rainer Hildebrandt’s singular obsession with the former wall as a kind of idée fixe: every object on display in this kitschy and idiosyncratic museum bears the imprint of its founder’s efforts (Figure 3.4). At first glance the Mauermuseum would appear to be cast in the negative mold of the Border Patrol Museum: it celebrates the unbordering of Eastern Europe, while the Border Patrol Museum promotes American borders as integral to national identity, providing justification for the newly-built border fortifications along the US–Mexico Border. The overriding final message of the Mauermuseum corroborates the familiar story of the fall of the Berlin Wall and ends with a section celebrating non-violent struggle, freedom, world peace and understanding between “all peoples, ethnic and ethical groups, and religions.” This generalized association between the fall of the Wall and the potential for a peaceful world without borders would seem to convey an opposing view to the patriotic naval gazing

Figure 3.4 Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 (photo: Lee Rodney)

Exhibiting the Frontier 87 promoted by the Border Patrol Museum. As both institutions are privately funded, their messages serve as impassioned polemics, variously for and against bordering; but they are equally dedicated to the fetishization of border paraphernalia as a means to promote freedom and democracy. And though they showcase antithetical situations (one presents a border to keep people in, the other to keep people out; one displays a collection of escape vehicles, while the other displays patrol vehicles) they do so in such zealous and dogmatic ways that their messages almost seem to converge. Owing to their independence from government support, these museums have crafted singular narratives of the divergent border histories that they seek to memorialize, and though they represent different political situations and positions on bordering, they operate as two successive episodes in a shifting saga of territorial borders at the outset of the 21st century. The Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie presents the history of the Berlin Wall as one of oppression and violence, a tragic period that cleaved the nation and the capital in two and sent thousands fleeing across the border toward the West. Writing on the history of the Wall, Frederick Taylor suggests that it “supplied, above all, an excellent propaganda weapon against the Communists.”16 If this can be seen as the Berlin Wall’s Cold War identity, it continues to exercise significant influence in the Wall’s relative absence, and can be seen to take on increased powers in its reliquary forms, not only in the Mauermuseum, but above all in its various pieces that are distributed throughout Berlin and around the world. The size of Checkpoint Charlie today is significantly reduced and the guard station exists only in replica, just outside the Mauermuseum, near the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. But the site still serves as one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions. As ground zero during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie became the 20th-century version of the American frontier, partitioning the American-controlled sector of West Berlin from the Soviet-controlled East Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie now functions as street theatre, with actors playing the roles of Soviet and American border guards offering to stamp tourists’ passports. This small, performative space at the threshold of the Cold War divide is one of a few remaining traces left of the walled city. Like the Mauermuseum itself, what remains of Checkpoint Charlie is simultaneously triumphant and stifling, performing as both participatory theatre and as a sober monument to the recent past. Moreover, the site celebrates the arrival of a new world order in Europe, a borderless world that is defined in the spaces colonized by transnational capitalism surrounding the former Cold War relic. The Mauermuseum is divided into two sections, running somewhat chronologically from the entry. The first half is housed in a series of 19thcentury apartments that span two floors containing exhibits that cover the history of the post-war division of Germany up to 1987, as well as the Museum’s collection of escape vehicles, including a homemade hot air balloon, a mini-submarine, a Trabant, Volkswagen and an Opel, as well as

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other artifacts of the divided city. Lining the stairwells and hallways are paintings and sculptures schooled in expressionism, caricatured allusions to the metaphor of the Wall as a wound across the German body. The second half of the museum extends into architect Peter Eisenman’s Internationale Bauausstellung project (IBA) and prominently houses the Ronald Reagan gallery. This display includes Reagan’s personal chainsaw and the handwritten notes to his famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech, presented side by side, as if Reagan arrived for his historic visit to West Berlin with chainsaw in hand (see Figure 3.5). The large windows along this gallery look out across Friedrichstrasse to a view of the signs for McDonald’s, Subway and Snackpoint Charlie, a backdrop that gleefully announces the triumph of global capital and the arrival of homogenized fast food, while also suggesting that the “American Sector” lives on into the 21st century. The Reagan room prepares visitors for the grand finale in the Mauermuseum, a section of Eisenman’s new wing that juts out over the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, showcasing the material remains of Checkpoint Charlie, including the original sign as well as the dividing line that once geographically marked the division between East and West. Embedded in the floor and covered in Plexiglas, the broken pieces of the line are referred to as the “crown jewels” in the museum’s literature, a not-

Figure 3.5 Ronald Reagan room, Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 (photo: Lee Rodney)

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Figure 3.6 Mauermuseum, Berlin, 2012 (photo: Lee Rodney)

so-ironic reference to the monetary value of the broken bits of concrete that were sold and shipped around the world as token memorials of the Berlin Wall after 1989 (see Figure 3.6). Peter Eisenman began his project for the IBA, the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie with an archeological metaphor. Completed in 1987, the project took the location of Checkpoint Charlie metaphorically as an “artificial excavation” site in the block running adjacent to the Berlin Wall.17 Eisenman’s ambitious housing complex was never completed to plan and was only partially realized along the block of Friedrichstrasse. In pure deconstructionist fashion, Eisenman’s view to the past was not one preoccupied with a singular search for truth, or the type of fact-finding missions traditionally used in archeological processes. Rather, Eisenman’s project suggested a complicated history of the site that anticipated a future equally charged by the material remnants of its past, making use of a series of canted, overlapping grids—the Mercator grid over the 18th-century urban plan of Berlin. If the seemingly banal remnants of the Cold War have become popular fetish objects enshrined in a contemporary museological setting, it should be asked what these have come to stand for. Further, what might this museum actually stage for the thousands of tourists who visit it year after year?

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As a testament to un-bordering in an era of pervasive security, surveillance and suspicion, the bipolar world represented by the Berlin Wall provides a comfortable picture of a clearly defined world order, the black and white of communist oppression and capitalist freedom, spatially divided by the Wall, which served for years as an “existential symbol transcending immediate political significance.” Thus, writes Yosefa Loshitsky, “within the context of the sudden collapse of world bipolarity, the fall of the Wall appeared as the perfect metaphor of what has been described as both the ‘end of history’ and the rebirth of history.”18 Indeed, the Berlin Wall has become a primary object of contention within German historical consciousness: Loshitsky writes of the role played by the Wall as a involuntary memorial to World War II, one that stood, indirectly, as punishment for the Third Reich and the subsequent occupation of Germany by the Allied forces. Given the subliminal status of the Wall in German post-war consciousness, Loshitsky suggests that its destruction in 1989 marked a kind of release, one linked to the desire to forget the burden of the Holocaust. For her, the manual destruction of the Wall served not only as a symbol of “freedom” but also as an act of “redemption” for the German people: “The people, however, enacted this redemption with their own hands by manually destroying the Wall. The people’s choice was not to remember World War II and their destruction of the Wall attests to this fact”.19 In Berlin’s makeover as a unified city, there is very little of the Wall remaining. Much of it has been stamped out by new developments that seek to advertise the triumphal touchdown of global capital and Berlin’s status as the financial capital of Europe. In this context, the Wall, or what remains of it, is the tourist attraction par excellence, much like Rome’s ruins, though buried and camouflaged by the successive building blitzes in the city over the last 30 years: it now forms part of an urban treasure hunt. While much of its former route is marked by large photographic panels to document historical events that took place along its 96-mile (154 km) course, the small remaining sections of the Wall and its physical representations throughout the city work to punctuate the urban landscape and make it legible through the grammar of a new world order that led to its destruction. The symbolic importance of the remaining Wall is especially apparent at the Berlin Wall Memorial, a site at Bernauer Strasse a few miles away from Checkpoint Charlie where a 60-metre stretch, including the former “no-man’s-land” (a heavily militarized strip on the Eastern side of the Wall) has been preserved undeveloped. The memorial stands as a stark counterpoint to the Mauermuseum. The remaining section of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse has been framed by metal laminate panels that bracket it within the former border zone, reflecting the space so that it appears like a slice of time cut out of the surrounding urban area. Unlike the idiosyncratic Mauermuseum, with its highly animated and sensationalized presentation, the starkness of the Berlin Wall Memorial is typical of many professional heritage practices where the site itself becomes archeological, stripped down

Exhibiting the Frontier 91 to its component parts and left bare for the visitor to contemplate the magnitude of historical circumstance. The importance of site is underscored in Berlin’s recent reconstruction projects, particularly the Topography of Terror (1987–2010), an open-air museum at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, flanked on its north side by the second longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall that was constructed atop the former Gestapo prison. These layers of political extremes become painfully apparent in the archeological presentation where the excavation frames the ruins. The Mauermuseum also has a very small slab of the Wall, but it has no relation to its original location and is situated, conveniently, like a decorative sculpture near the entrance of the museum for passing tourists. On the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alexandra Hildebrandt, the current director of the Mauermuseum, staged a temporary memorial to the victims of the Wall by placing pieces of the original structure near Checkpoint Charlie along with black crosses. The controversial installation prompted debate over how to devise “a clearly focused plan to remember the German division.” The following year, the Berlin Senate Department of Culture set out to better integrate the various sites into a “holistic memorial site concept,” modes of exhibition that impacted both the Topography of Terror and the Berlin Wall Memorial.20 Sunil Manghani suggests that such display strategies and images can be understood in terms of their repetition, much like “a vibration that rings out over time” resonating a Western sense of liberation and victory. The endless televised images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he writes, form an “underlying repetition, as a continuum, rather than a series of discrete, empirical occurrences.”21 This idea was confirmed in the televised 20th-anniversary celebrations commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009. Strikingly, its central motif was a staged replica of the Wall, assembled from simulated fragments that fell like dominoes in a continuous line to a cheering crowd snapping photographs. This official demonstration of un-bordering that took place in 2009 served as a global media event that replayed the promise of a borderless world, one that appeared to be so close in the 1990s and so far away a decade later. In these current contexts, borders are being actively reinvented to accommodate or gloss over inherent paradoxes that are all too apparent to anyone seeking to migrate or even travel outside of one’s country of origin. Simultaneously, national boundaries and norms have been drastically altered by the marriage of transnational capital and new security initiatives, programs that privilege the movement of goods over people. Just as the Berlin Wall produced the conformist, passive “walled subjects” of the East Germans it kept in, Wendy Brown suggests that “Contemporary walls, especially those around democracies, often undo or invert the contrasts they are meant to inscribe,” instead generating “an increasingly closed and policed collective identity in place of the open

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society they would defend.”22 In spite of its temporal and political alterity, she suggests, the Berlin Wall is not so different from the new generation of walls that have been put up around the world since 1989.

Mobile American Frontier In Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech from 1987, he noted that “freedom and security go together” as if forecasting the limits of freedom that have been tested by security initiatives put in place after 2001. Though freedom was the mantra that Reagan invoked, a mantra that has been used repeatedly to justify overseas military intervention long after the Cold War, the idea of freedom has also paradoxically justified rebuilding walls and checkpoints on the physical boundaries of the United States. This process suggests that the elasticity of the frontier as a spatial limit has been reined in from the far-flung terrestrial and geospatial locations of the 20th century as a tighter perimeter is drawn around the continental United States through the rebordering exercises of recent years. While freedom and the frontier are intrinsically bound together and deeply rooted in American cultural mythology, borders do not carry the same set of associations. Borders and checkpoints serve as military installations that signal the closure of societies, as Reagan noted in his famous speech when referring to the borders erected by other countries. However, the physical and technological expansion of the US Border Patrol in recent years suggests that the concept of freedom that is so central to American identity is also on the wane at the same time that US sovereignty is diminishing. The disconnection between the rhetoric of freedom and new bordering projects undertaken in recent years is significant. Perhaps this is why the General Services Administration (GSA) displayed its plans for border stations in the guise of the frontier in its 2006 exhibition, Thresholds along the Frontier: “U.S. border stations,” writes David Winstead, commissioner of the GSA’s project, “strive to convey a sense of openness and welcome that is a hallmark of America’s history. . . . Crossing the border between the United States and Canada or Mexico is a significant experience and one increasingly distinguished by iconic architecture.”23 The incongruity between the experiences of travellers using US ports of entry and the calming platitudes in the press release for the exhibition is striking. Simple questions arise: How do these statements square with contemporary American geopolitics? What does one make of the welcoming language that frames this project when the operations of the border have spread well beyond the line itself? And finally, what is the frontier’s threshold in an era of prisons and detention camps both within and offshore? While the Thresholds exhibition seems to ignore issues related to the 21stcentury border, it reinvests the international boundary between the continental US and its neighbors with a sense of symbolic importance that is missing in the highly technical and militaristic language of 21st-century

Exhibiting the Frontier 93 security discourse. It does this by conveying the notion of ceremonial passage that is theoretically implied by crossing the border, even if this liminal threshold is frequently eclipsed by long wait times and invasive questioning. This exhibition attempted to reframe the US border in terms of a hasslefree travel experience. As if the border were a place to orient the weary traveller, it featured public art commissions and architectural designs reminiscent of tourist bureaus and Interstate rest stops from a previous golden age of motor travel. While it is clear that this vision of the border will never materialize as imagined in the design competition, the GSA seemed to recognize the importance of the frontier in the American imagination as a concept that could blend the mobility of the technological border with an older patriotic attachment to territorial expansion and sovereignty. But the idea of the frontier can only be called upon as a nostalgic trope, particularly when one considers the fact that the southwestern US is now heavily populated rather than the terra incognita or the “edge of civilization” that once was implied in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 19th-century frontier thesis. The GSA’s project to rebuild and re-conceive the idea of the US border station is part of a much larger paradigm shift in American security policy. Here, Jason Ackleson, following the work of Ulrich Beck, argues that this policy shift has been shaped by the framework of “risk society” which posits that the magnitude and impact of future threats cannot be precisely determined from the past, though they must be predicted and guarded against.24 Jacques Rancière pushes further in suggesting that what goes under the name of “risk society” is part of a larger “insecurity principle” that governs the post-democratic societies we live in. The sign of insecurity has become so pervasive that it has become managed and codified as an integral part of risk society, forming its own distribution of the sensible that can be seen most prominently in everything from the Department of Homeland Security’s (now defunct) color-coded warning system to the construction of the wall between US and Mexico. It is shaped as much by news media as it is by the physical installations along US borders. In a damning passage that points to the American government’s inability to stop an “extensively premeditated attack” Rancière radically shifts our field of perception to suggest that what could be regarded as oversight is rather a management issue that frames threat as omnipresent and invisible: “To foresee dangers is one thing; to manage the sentiment of insecurity is another . . . for our countries, insecurity is essentially much more than a set of facts. It is a mode of management of collective life.”25 Thresholds along the Frontier opened during the first phase of construction on the new security fence along the US–Mexico border, a massive project that has been highly controversial throughout the US and internationally. Staging the border station as an entry point or gateway to the United States at a time when the image of fortress America was circulating both home and abroad seemed like a carefully timed public

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relations exercise to soften the impact of 21st-century border policies that undercut the founding principles of the US as an open and free society. This exhibition is inseparable from this political moment, and whether or not it succeeded in shifting public opinion about the new security-first border programs under the Department of Homeland Security it certainly worked to present a fresh and friendly face on a border that had been missing since 2002 when the Department of Homeland Security was formed. In 2009, Joseph Nye updated his soft power thesis rebranding it as “smart power,” a blend of conventional force (military, border patrol) with well-timed, non-aggressive communications exercises. This notion can be detected as early as 2001 when the Smart Border Declaration was established through new programs that encompassed everything from preclearance processing for goods shipments to Nexus and FAST lanes to expedite “trusted travelers”. Such techno-bureaucratic terms paint a picture of new world borders that are almost magic, simultaneously secure and efficient, open and closed. It is within Nye’s “smart” framework that the curatorial aims of Thresholds along the Frontier might be situated. If the Department of Homeland Security directly manifests hard power with its walling projects along the border of the southern US, the GSA could be seen as a soft-power player that attempts to ideologically balance such state force. Visions of the border have not always been so guarded. While Winstead’s invitation for us to recall a “sense of openness and welcome that is a hallmark of America’s history” may seem unrealistic in light of contemporary immigration debates as well as infringements on privacy, it is important to hold open the possibility of the border as a gateway rather than a barrier, as a means of connection rather than separation. This was the case during the 1960s when Mexico’s Programa Nacional Fronterizo sponsored a series of modernist border crossing plazas and complexes that were built as gateways to Mexico, a program that attempted to acculturate the northern border in order to attract US tourists.26 While ProNaF was the precursor to the Border Industrialization Program (a project that built the US–Mexico border region as an export-processing zone with the attendant disregard for human and environmental value) it began with a premise of the border as place inscribed with modern values of cosmopolitanism and urban encounter rather than a precarious transit zone infused with fear. The former vision is currently lost, overshadowed by needs of transnational business and security firms. Occasionally, however, a sense of optimism persists: in 1999 the Mexican architect Fernando Romero proposed a museum bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, a plan that served as a pedestrian crossing between the two cities that was also designed as a cultural center and museum. Romero’s project may never be built, but it continues to circulate in architectural blogs where it takes on the appearance of a giant spacecraft landing over the banks of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo next to an old industrial train bridge. The extra-

Exhibiting the Frontier 95 terrestrial association of the project has only been heightened by the course of Juárez’s recent history in the ongoing saga of drug cartel violence. Along the Canada–US border at the crossing between Messina, New York and Cornwall, Ontario, one of the GSA’s new border stations opened in 2009. Its design was lauded by Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for the New York Times, but only in the context of its alteration, which made headlines when its most notable design feature was removed for security reasons.27The Messina station was part of Thresholds along the Frontier, one of the thirteen featured designs for the new border stations. The station featured a giant sign that ran the length of building that spelled out United States, in yellow capital letters. It faced the Canadian border, prominently advertising the port of entry into the United States. Its design recalled the language of Pop Art. The station’s photographic documentation looked like an Ed Ruscha painting: a cool, minimal landscape as viewed from the freeway. A month after the station opened, the letters were removed from the station by Customs and Border Patrol who felt that the sign posed a security risk to the workers in the buildings. Ouroussoff was quick to note the irony of the situation. In a statement that echoed GSA commissioner Winstead’s, he noted that the incident “underscores how the desire for security continues to override the spirit of openness that is fundamental to a functioning democracy.”28 Far from its 19th-century origins somewhere in the southwestern US, the American frontier has proven to be an exceptionally resilient and malleable idea. Although the Thresholds exhibition attempted to invoke the historical notion of the frontier in its design competition, it seems as though the concept has been overshadowed by the paradigm of border as a faceless monolith, something that eludes visibility at the same time that it conditions mobility. In contemporary language, the difference between frontier and border is only really notable in English usage where the term frontier is more metaphorical, infused with the American mythology of progress. While people intuitively understand the conceptual difference between a border and a frontier, the two terms are mutually exclusive: in principle, once you have a border the frontier no longer exists. The frontier disappeared from the US census in 1890, prompting Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous reflection on its significance in American culture. What Turner described as a unifying thesis, arguably linked to the ideas of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, is now positioned more in terms of a powerful founding mythology and one that has not entirely disappeared. Richard Slotkin’s three-volume study on the development and perpetuation of the frontier myth within American nationalism suggests that this is no trivial matter and that the idea of the frontier continues to exercise power in contemporary American culture and politics. In many global contexts, however, the traditional distinction between borders and frontiers “seems to dissolve” according to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, who posit the idea of the frontier as integral to 21st-century capitalism.29

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These shifting perspectives on borders and frontiers are presented in the Mauermuseum, the Border Patrol Museum and in the GSA’s Thresholds exhibition. Read successively, these exhibitions have emphasized both the frontier’s mobility and its impermeability. These presentations of the frontier differ fundamentally from those presented at the Ellis Island Park and Immigration Museum, where America’s “golden doors” have become ideologically reified as the legendary early 20th-century gateway to America. Notably, the Ellis Island Museum falls under the jurisdiction of the US Department of the Interior serving as a frontier heritage site that provides a comforting narrative about America’s past as a refuge for the “poor, huddled masses.” In looking to the ways in which American borders have been positioned in museological constructs, it is possible to see how they exhibit truth claims pertaining to territorial control and historical process. Both borders and museums are deeply tied to political processes and are frequently presented as natural facts. The Border Patrol Museum and the Mauermuseum are private institutions that establish the notion of the American frontier (whether territorially situated or geographically extended during the Cold War) as the spatial limit of democracy and freedom, a claim that has been increasingly challenged over the last decade. The idea of the American frontier has steadily evolved over the course of the 20th century, being re-inflected at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the first phase of the Cold War. During the 1970s and 1980s, the American frontier got “lost in space” after the televised moon landing, and again, when transnational capitalism forecast the end of the nation state. More recently with the establishment of the US–Mexico border wall, the frontier came crashing back down to earth like a piece of technology that will never work again in the way it was intended to. As Wendy Brown points out, the new walls of the nation state do not serve a military function. Rather, “they have come to present a ‘reassuring world picture’ in a time increasingly lacking the horizons, containment, and security that humans have historically required for social and psychic integration and for political membership.”30 Ultimately, these contemporary border exhibitions articulate a secure American frontier for both domestic and international audiences that obscures the uncertainty unleashed by the 1989 heralding of a borderless “free world.”

Notes 1 Kristin Ross, “Historicizing Untimeliness,” in Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Eds.), Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 15. 2 Rancière, Chronicles, xi. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 184.

Exhibiting the Frontier 97 4 The museum is variously named on-site and online as the National Border Patrol Museum and the US Border Patrol Museum. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to it as simply the Border Patrol Museum. 5 Daniel Borunda, “Special Report: Juárez Deserves Title of Most Dangerous City in the World,” El Paso Times, June 7, 2010. Accessed February 20, 2012 at: www.elpasotimes.com/juarez/ci_15241689 6 Andrew Rice, “Life on the Line between El Paso and Juárez,” New York Times, July, 28, 2011. 7 Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the US–Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 4. Daniel Drache, Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for North America (Halifax: Fernwood, 2004), 25. 8 Rice, “Life on the Line.” 9 While the Department of Homeland Security has given billions of dollars in grants to increase security in several states (including funding for communications and research), the Border Patrol Museum does not list the Department of Homeland Security among its supporters and donors. See https://borderpatrolmuseum.com the Border Patrol Museum’s website, which describes that its funding comes from private donor sources exclusively. 10 The Border Patrol Museum also serves as a site to apply and interview for positions as US Border Patrol agents. The agency expanded rapidly between 2006 and 2008. See Andrew Becker and Richard Marosi, “Border Agency’s Rapid Growth Accompanied by Rise in Corruption,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2011. Accessed October 20, 2013 at: http://articles.latimes.com/ 2011/oct/16/local/la-me-border-corrupt-20111017 11 Jay Root, “Texas Ranchers Scoff at Border Fence,” Seattle Times, July 15, 2007. Accessed January 11, 2016 at: www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ texas-ranchers-scoff-at-border-fence 12 Brown, Walled States, 24. 13 Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2011), 81. 14 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Jonathan Harris, Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 15 Rancière, Chronicles, ix. 16 Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided 1961—1989 (London and New York: HarperCollins, 2006), xxi. 17 Jean-François Bédard et al., Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978—1988 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1994), 5. 18 Yosefa Loshitsky, “Constructing and Deconstructing the Wall,” CLIO, 26: 3 (1997), 11. 19 Loshitsky, “Constructing and Deconstructing,” 8. 20 Paul Sigel, “The Berlin Wall as a Memorial.” Accessed January 11, 2016 at: www.goethe.de/ges/mol/dos/ber/wan/en205918.htm 21 Sunil Manghani, Image Critique and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), Kindle ed., location 935. 22 Brown, Walled States, 40. 23 David Winstead, Thresholds along the Frontier: Contemporary US Border Stations, General Services Administration press release, 2006. Accessed January 10, 2016 at: www.gsa.gov/portal/content/102213

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24 Ackleson, “Border Security in Risk Society,” 3. 25 Rancière, Chronicles, 113. 26 Daniel Arreola and James Curtis, Mexican Border Cities: Landscape, Anatomy and Place Personality (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 23. 27 Nicolai Ouroussoff, “At a Border Crossing, Security Trumps Openness,” New York Times, July 26, 2009. Accessed September 25, 2013 at: www.nytimes. com/2009/07/27/arts/design/27border.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 28 Ouroussoff, “At a Border Crossing.” 29 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 16. 30 Brown, Walled States, 26.

4

Canada as the Borderline Case “Outer America” and the Northern Frontier

Early on in the first season of Anthony Bourdain’s itinerant food show, Parts Unknown, he visits Canada as one of six places in a culinary tour of global hot spots that includes Libya, Myanmar and Congo. Parts Unknown is produced by CNN, and it often focuses on places that are off the Michelin map of culinary culture for political or economic reasons. On his trip to Canada, Bourdain travelled to “remote areas within the province of Quebec,” or so it was narrated in the introduction. In reality, Bourdain travelled to Montreal and Quebec City, making a few trips to the wintry, boreal countryside for an ice-fishing lunch on the Rivière des Outaouais and then on to La Cabane à Sucre, a maple sugar farmstead about 20 miles outside of Montreal’s center. Despite Bourdain’s valiant attempts to address the issue of Quebec separatism, the political questions came off as vastly oversimplified. Wondering why his hosts go to such great lengths to preserve traditions such as trapping beaver he asked whether it was from a sense of patriotism. His hosts seemed rather cagey about what patriotism meant, but they all answered, “of course.” It wasn’t clear, however, whether their agreement signaled allegiance to Canada or to Quebec. The ambiguity was swiftly glossed over by another meal, an excess of wine, meat and black truffles that are exceedingly rare outside of the gastronomic utopia that is Quebec. And here is where Bourdain missed the political point that his hosts only intimated. Where Bourdain saw one great culinary white North with an interesting political anecdote of separatism, he mistook a part for the whole: Quebec’s culinary culture became a symbol of contemporary Canadiana, one that elided fractures in the political landscape. Canada has made international headlines in recent years amid global controversy. From the environmental impact of the Alberta Tar Sands and the proposed expansion to the transnational Keystone pipeline, to the G8 and G20 meetings in 2010, there is a sense that Canada can no longer be disregarded as a sleepy, snow-covered landmass, or a benign peacekeeping nation on the sidelines of global affairs. While Parts Unknown speaks to the idea of the North as a Canadian cultural heartland (a cliché that is belied by the fact that 90 percent of its population lives along its southernmost fringe on the border with the US) it also flags Canada as a

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site of change, although this was not the narrative taken up as the political issue of the hour on Bourdain’s show. The idea of the North has been a persistent obsession for some time in Canadian culture, and strongly so since Confederation in 1867. From this point onward, an emergent “nordicity” has been steadily cultivated, one that is equal in its nationalist sentiment to the position held by the West in American national consciousness. However, as climate change has a domino effect that begins with melting sea ice, there has been increasing international attention paid to the planet’s circumpolar regions and Canada’s political attitude toward its Northern sovereignty has proceeded apace. This chapter explores the persistence of the North as a national obsession in Canada and the various ways that Northern imagery has been recycled and renewed for global export. In doing so, it also addresses longstanding ideas about Canadian cultural geography and its privileged metaphors of the North as part of a complex of imagined divisions and frontiers that are currently shifting as its international border with the US takes on increased significance. Rob Shields has written of the preoccupation with defining the North within Canada as a borderline between a masculinized, remote northern wilderness and a southern, urbanized mass culture, one infected by the influence of the US. This “True North” is a masculine-gendered, liminal zone of rites de passage and re-creative freedom and escape. It is a resource and economic hinterland which is simultaneously incorporated in a social spatialisation as a mythic heartland. [. . . This dualism] provides a foundation for Canadian nationalists because it provides the possibility of setting a “Canadian nature” (The “True North”) off against “American mass culture” entirely originating, or so we are asked to believe, south of the border.1 These various entanglements with the North have taken on different forms. During the mid–late 20th century, a highly cultivated and comforting “nordicity” can be read through the nationalist landscape image as well as through the promotion of Inuit art. Recently, a more disquieting preoccupation with Canada’s Arctic as a site of uncertainty and alterity can be read as a form of “norientalism,” an outer limit of Canadian territorial identity that is shape-shifting through climate change. As one of two predominant and at times overlapping national metaphors informed by geography, the northern frontier vies with the idea of Canada as a “borderline case,” a jocular observation that Marshall McLuhan once proposed to describe Canada’s relationship to its southern neighbor. Within the geopolitical context of the Cold War, McLuhan saw Canada as cool, ambiguous and low-profile, a position he saw as relatively advantageous. He thus spun the Canada–US border into a multiplicity of

Canada as the Borderline Case 101 adaptive and technological metaphors as “an area of spiraling repetition and replay, of both inputs and feedback, of both interlace and interface, an area of ‘double ends jointed,’ of rebirth and metamorphosis.”2 McLuhan’s optimistic assessment of Canada’s borderline status as an “ideal pattern of electronic living” now seems as charming as Winston Churchill’s utterance about the world’s “longest undefended border” between Canada and the US. However, McLuhan’s essay also highlights the ongoing tension between these two geographic metaphors: Canada as both “northern” and “borderline.” In this, it is possible to read the relays and reverberations of Canada’s shifting position within North America from the Cold War to NAFTA and into the observant states of North America in the wake of 9/11. The joke about the American grade-school geography lesson of Canada as “America’s hat” (an empty sartorial accessory to the head formed by the 52 contiguous states that it protects) has been replaced with new and shifting narratives. In the final years of Stephen Harper’s tenure as Prime Minister, commentary regularly appeared in the US and the UK with a rather different stance. At the end of the Harper government’s long decade in power, Canada was called out as “a Rogue, Reckless Petrostate” and the “greedy white north.” Writing for the New York Observer, Duff McDonald humorously noted the shift in a global stance that Canada has taken of its own accord: “the point now isn’t whether Canada is morally superior to the US, but that its government has actually embraced the macho dictatorial approach of Putin’s Russia while making sweet love to the insatiable energy hunger of China.”3 Protections for Canada’s resource economy have combined with a statist security agenda that has redefined the relationship between resistance and terrorism. Indigenous peoples have been under increased scrutiny along with environmental groups that oppose the Alberta Tar Sands project. In January, 2015, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police labeled the “antipetroleum” movement “as a growing and violent threat to Canada’s security.”4 Similarly, First Nations sovereignty over territorial rights and resource development have frequently conflicted since the late 1990s. Shiri Pasternak notes that since then the surveillance of “native unrest” has been closely followed by the Canadian Forces National Counter-Intelligence Unit and the Department of National Defense.5 Indigenous sovereignty clearly complicates the security agenda in Canada, but, at the same time, the maintenance of a Northern image of the country in a global perspective has often relied upon claiming the Inuit and First Nations as integral to Canadian identity in a post-1967 context. Thus, the tensions between a nationalist desire to claim the image of Inuit and First Nations as a distinct part of Canadian culture, while at the same time neglecting treaty rights and monitoring forms of native resistance to resource extraction projects on indigenous land, has led to a different sense of bordering and security in Canada than in the US.

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Canada’s Multiple Borderline Cases In June 2010, Canada hosted the G8 and the G20 international trade summits back-to-back on the same weekend. The first summit was held in the Muskoka region, an area directly north of Toronto that is popularly known as “cottage country” and the historic backdrop of much iconic Canadian landscape imagery. The G20 Summit that immediately followed took place in central Toronto which was temporarily partitioned into discrete zones for security and media. Both zones were elaborately staged: the “Canadian Experience” media pavilion, set up inside the Toronto Convention Centre, mounted a simulacrum of cottage country for international journalists. This portrayed the Disneyfied image of a northern idyll that came off as patronizing and extravagant: snapshots of a pristine Canadian wilderness were presented on the far side of a pool of water, surrounded by a cedar, wharf-like structure with Muskoka chairs and canoes (Figure 4.1). In the weeks prior to the summit, the theatre of the “fake lake” was roundly criticized for its excess. More pointedly, the artificial tranquility of the pavilion contrasted strongly with the security perimeter that eventually surrounded the convention center outside, taking up much of the downtown core. Here a 10-foot high partition fence ran nearly two miles. It created a sensitive zone around the summit and worked as an antagonizing gesture in the anticipated battle between protesters and the security complex of municipal police units that has been evolving around trade events in the last decade.

Figure 4.1 Canadian Experience Pavilion “Fake Lake,” Toronto G20 Summit (photo: Canadian Press, 2010)

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Figure 4.2 Police car on fire, Toronto G20 Summit (photo: Canadian Press, 2010)

The most powerful images that ran in global media from that weekend were those of a burning police car set on fire by Black Bloc protesters, who infiltrated an otherwise peaceful demonstration outside the G20 meeting (Figure 4.2). In retrospect, the squad cars have been implicated as props in a highly spectacular series of events, providing a counterpoint to the fake lake that was constructed for visiting international dignitaries and media. The controversy over the Muskoka stage set was quickly forgotten as events unfolded over the weekend. Over 1000 people were arrested and detained for several days following the pyrotechnics of the Black Bloc, interlopers who had torched the squad cars parked several blocks away from the main site of the demonstration. At issue for many people who witnessed and followed the events, was the extensive cost of the security apparatus, which protected dignitaries from terrorist threats, but failed to protect citizens rights to peacefully demonstrate against the austerity measures that were proposed by the summits’ agendas. This was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, one that criminalized social dissent through casting all protest as violent behavior.6 Security presence in Canada, as elsewhere, has been on the rise in recent years, much of it in response to the idea that the country is ill-equipped to deal with the rise of global terror. In October 2014, the nation’s capital went through its “10 hours of terror” as a lone gunman shot and killed a Canadian soldier and made the rounds throughout halls of parliament.7 This story was quickly announced on international media as a terror plot

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when the motives for the shooting were eventually linked to single gunman who had attempted to turn himself in to police in Vancouver several months earlier. The Ottawa incident instantly spurred heightened security across the country: a bearded colleague of mine was arrested the following day near the riverfront in Windsor, Ontario by local police while taking a walk. He was released after questioning, though the sense of suspicion and vigilance seems unwarranted and disproportionate to the level of threat, given that Windsor is 500 miles from Ottawa, though it is on the doorstep of the United States. When central Canada is on high alert, that sense of panic quickly extends to the Canada–US border, which McLuhan once described as an “interval of resonance,” a space that is now increasingly taut and high-pitched. The question now seems to revolve around whether McLuhan’s metaphors are still as productive as they were in the 1970s when he wrote of the “psychological entanglements” of Canada’s multiple borderlines traversing Canadian culture and identity. Today’s security complex of “mission creep,” however, has also confused the lines that once “separated local policing and national security,” according to John Lorinc, which have become fused in events like the Ottawa shooting and the G20 protests. The metaphor of Canada as a “borderline case” has an enduring legacy in Canadian culture even though interpretations of McLuhan’s laconic essay from 1977 vary widely. So confident was McLuhan in the strength of Canada’s culturally ambivalent position, that he could write that “Canada’s borderline encourages the expenditure on communication of what might otherwise be spent on armament and fortification.”8 McLuhan argued that Canadian identity was forged from a position of ambivalence and understood Canada’s borderline status as a kind of frontier condition. In a twist on Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—that the frontier was the proving ground of American national identity—McLuhan suggested that the concept of the frontier as “a space between two worlds” also becomes a “place of Canadianization,” one characterized by “interface” and “abrasion.”9 McLuhan’s essay was published in the same year as the Berger report on the proposed MacKenzie Valley Pipeline project through the Northwest Territories. Justice Berger’s inquiry into the human and environmental cost of the pipeline took place in consultation with the Inuit, Dene and Métis along with Canadian settler constituencies; in his words it comprised consultation with “four races speaking seven different languages.” This landmark document recommended suspension of the project until indigenous land claims could be settled. It also described the tensions in the North at the time as those between an economic frontier and a native homeland.10 The frontier metaphor and the epic narrative tension that framed the Berger report appears again in more recent media coverage of the Arctic, though on different terms.11 More immediately, the power of this frontier metaphor was not lost on McLuhan, who saw this tension as emblematic of a Canadian condition.

Canada as the Borderline Case 105 McLuhan’s understanding of the multiplicity of Canada’s borderlines (as those drawn through culture and communication) had widespread reception as a postmodern national narrative. Janine Marchessault writes that McLuhan’s borderline metaphor resonates because it is at the same time “aesthetic, epistemological and juridical” yet “porous” and “charged with emotional intensities.”12 But cultural readings that accommodate ambiguity and contradiction have fallen off the radar in recent years. These are particularly confusing times in Canada. What was played out during the G20 represented a growing polarization between a resurgent conservative nationalism and a more critical, post-nationalist understanding of the country that includes indigenous and alter-globalization movements that have further cut through the fictions of Canadian nationalism especially as they have been articulated through Canada’s role in NAFTA, a role that was first fashioned through trade agreements, and later folded into security mandates.13 Along with Harold Innis, McLuhan started a longstanding critical tradition that places Canadian nationhood within the context of technology and communication, and these readings of Canada’s relationship to technology have served to challenge the construction of nationhood and the fiction of the North as the bedrock of Canadian identity. This relationship between technology and geopolitics has been at the forefront of Canadian cultural studies where Canada becomes a post-national “nation,” a delightfully complicated oxymoron that makes for a cultural situation that is both academically sophisticated and difficult to package and simplify as a national brand. In this context, the Canada–US border becomes an object of cultural curiosity. Jody Berland writes that “the consciousness of the border’s arbitrary location is one reason critics call Canada the world’s first postmodern country,” which is also to say that Canada has no cohesive metanarrative to fashion a singular national identity. Thus, it is said that the “country registers the prospect of reconciliation among multiple identities, ‘in-process’ rather than complete; ‘in-between’ rather than whole; a ‘contrapuntal’ form rather than a singular narrative.”14 This critical reading takes into account the self-reflexivity of the Canadian situation, caught linguistically between English and French, suspended temporally between British and American Empires, and politically between the historical agendas of settler colonialism and contemporary decolonial struggles. If a singular identity can emerge from this, it is one that is shot through with post-national questioning, a knowing and sometimes cynical relationship to identity and territory that was at the forefront of debates on hybridity that flourished in the 1990s and have fallen off the radar in the wake of 9/11 in the midst of the ongoing redefinition of terror. The cultural polarization that came to a head in June 2010 took place between a conservative vision that featured Canada’s northern wilderness as “open for business” (from tourism to mining) and heterogeneous oppositional forces that had a different sense of what being “North of

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Empire” means in a 21st-century global context. While these battles are ongoing, multifaceted and complex (and by no means limited to the events surrounding the G8/G20) they are taking place as widespread frustration grows with the increasing securitization of Canada. This security agenda has been driven by “risk calculations” and perceptions of what an undefended and largely unknown Canada–US border means to Americans in the aftermath of 9/11. Berland writes that Canada has been long regarded by Americans as “a conduit for things—wood, comics, cold, terrorists” rather than a place.15 In the current security era, this perception is only more heightened and Canada’s borderline status more pronounced: both domestically, as cultural anxieties are renewed over resources, and externally as geopolitical tensions arise over climate change. The oscillation between an ambivalent, post-national consciousness that was typified in the metaphor of Canada as a “borderline case” and a resurgent conservative picture of Canada as a Northern frontier nation is one that was first animated in the concept of a “new” North America that emerged in the 1990s after NAFTA was signed into agreement. While trade agreements are widely seen as an economic variant of post-nationalism, they are often packaged with a static image of national culture that is easily consumed. Where cultural post-nationalism in Canada is often seen as postmodern or ironic, it is antithetical to trade agendas. The cultural image of trade promotion is unambiguously territorial, often employing landscape in the service of an oversimplified nationalism where place is crafted as commodity. Sarah E.K. Smith has identified how quickly modern landscape painting was put to the service of continental integration after NAFTA through a number of exhibitions that included Mexican, American and Canadian art as part of an educational exercise in an imagined geography of North America.16 The contradictions in a North American cultural project are rife given that NAFTA’s neoliberal focus privileged the movement of goods and raw materials rather than people, contradictions that destabilized labor and channeled clandestine migration in ways that are explored more fully in Chapters 5 and 6. Nonetheless successive attempts have been made to set cultural diplomacy and trade on the same trilateral course. The enduring geographic image of the “North” has not surprisingly played a more central role in recent years than the more complex identity of a “borderline case.” Less academic, and more broadly popular, ideas of the North have framed the canon of Canadian culture from the late 19th century onwards. As an essentialist metaphor at base, the equivalence between Canada and its north has proven resilient in spite of numerous contradictions posed by demography and the experience of immigration throughout the 20th century. Not surprisingly Canada’s Group of Seven have done double duty in this regard. The landscape image of Canadian wilderness conveyed in their work is broadly associated with an early 20thcentury nationalist spirit, a modernist project promoting a Northern

Canada as the Borderline Case 107 frontier ideal of clean living to an urbanized public that was developing in close proximity to the American border.17 It has also been used as the image of corporate Canada, for many years the poster child for Northern development and now in a newer globalized context of transnational trade. This image of a pristine wilderness has been used repeatedly in Canadian culture, long before Canada’s more recent neo-conservative decade which has enthusiastically reified the Northern imaginary for the purposes of selling Canada as a global brand, a project that began in the 1960s when Canada hosted Expo 67 as it celebrated its Centennial the same year.18 As much as the 2010 trade summits’ fake lake was interpreted as transparent schlock, it tapped into a powerful national image based on landscape that has proven difficult to cast off. This, despite a long generation of questioning that followed in the wake of the 1967 centennial celebrations by artists such as Joyce Wieland or Greg Curnoe who envisioned multiple alternatives for a national imaginary. During this time there have also been successive reminders that the modern vision of Canadian territory, one synonymous with the picture provided in the Group of Seven landscapes, does not align with indigenous perspectives of land which have since the 1970s collided head-on with governmental and corporate ownership agendas. In this the paintings of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun or the performances of Rebecca Belmore provide an antidote to the perennially celebrated image of the North. However, it is not as if these new, imagined geographies of Canada or alterNative perspectives and constitutional challenges have failed. It is rather that the image of the North represented through the Group of Seven currently functions as a Benjaminian “optical unconscious” of Canadian nationalism. So successful was the promotion of an authoritative national landscape image from the 1920s to 1940s that, according to Joyce Zemans, it dominated “the Canadian psyche for more than half a century.”19 A nation-wide program launched by the National Gallery of Canada in 1927 made high-quality reproductions of Canadian landscape painting widely available across Canada, with a specific focus on public schools where lesson leaflets were distributed along with the prints. Zemans summarized this program as “the creation of a linear history designed to position [Tom] Thompson and the Group of Seven at the apex of Canadian artistic achievement.”20 The success of this program has further informed a foolproof formula for conservative values. Peter White speaks of successive waves of Group of Seven promotion through anniversaries, blockbuster exhibitions, and large-scale, multi-volume coffee-table books that continue to reaffirm the same nationalist vision of the country from the early 20th century: this in the face of the massive social change that has taken place in the intervening century since these images were painted. The continued promotion of this dominant Canadian aesthetic White characterizes as a “form of nostalgia,” one that “smooths away the rough edges, tensions, and contradictions of

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the past.”21 It might also be argued that just as these landscapes advanced a unified Canadian aesthetic in the 20th century, they continue to be used in the same reassuring manner. Despite Canada’s shifting position in North America, a position that is fraught with multiple challenges to sovereignty over border control, trade and resources, the primitivist landscape image that the Group of Seven painters supplied to central Canada has the enduring appeal of a pioneering masculine ethos, one where a national destiny could be carved out of the North, away from the “feminizing” influence of American mass culture or the patronizing attitudes of the British Commonwealth.

Delimiting the North: Nordicity and North America But where did this preoccupation with the North come from, or why did the Group of Seven find such an enthusiastic reception from Canadian elites? The imagined division between north and south in Canada is more powerful than the 49th parallel as a defining territorial boundary and arguably has had more of an impact on national identity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Culture has long played a central role in establishing Canadian sovereignty over the North. As a political imperative handed down from the British Empire, Canada inherited the legacy of polar expeditions, those of Sir William Parry (1819–1820) and Sir John Franklin (1845), Arctic explorers who became Canadian heroes for a modern generation of schoolchildren as “Argonauts of the North” representative of the epic struggle of man against nature.22 Rob Shields refers to the centrality of Northern imagery in Canadian culture in terms of its “nordicity,” qualities derived from late 19th century historical texts extolling the virtues of a Northern temperament. The “true North strong and free,” the refrain of the Canadian national anthem is distilled from a British imperialist agenda, an ideal of Victorian discipline underwritten by forms of racism that were cast in terms of Northern superiority, ideals that paradoxically evolved into a project of “civilizing the Inuit” by the middle of the 20th century. Couched in a narrative of geographical determinism based on the austerity of cold climates, the idea that the North was the site for the advance of empire had become so well established in the Canadian imagination that it could be found echoed in government documents as late as the 1950s. A government publication, This is the Arctic, cited as a “curious fact” that “civilization has been expanding northward ever since the dawn of history.”23 Thus, according to Shields, the Canadian Arctic was imbricated within the great narratives of historical progress by the middle of the 20th century. As a topic of perennial interest, the North has made successive returns for different political and economic purposes in Canada. It is a liminal zone, a site of “pilgrimage,”24 according to Shields, serving as mythic heartland and an opposing pole to the 49th parallel. In contrast, the 49th parallel

Canada as the Borderline Case 109 has become a condensed geographic metaphor that signals the dividing line (cultural and political) between Canada and the United States even though nearly half of the international borderline does not follow its path. The idea of Canada as North has become particularly strong within trade contexts where Canada plays up its nordicity to the US, much in the same way that Mexico performs Latin flair for American audiences. The dominance of the US within NAFTA and subsequent trade and security discussions has oriented the cultural picture more firmly, determining what is “north” and “south” from the unchallenged assumption that the US is at the “center.” While it lies geographically in between Mexico and Canada, a more fine-grained perspective of how North and South function as conceptual poles in multiple contexts throughout the Americas remains a marginal issue within border studies as well as hemispheric and area studies more generally.25 So where does North begin in North America? It is a question that has vexed 19th-century geographers like Alexander von Humboldt as related in Chapter 1, and has become a matter of definition and debate for Canadian social scientists in the 20th century.26 While the imaginary line between North and South is tethered to national configurations it can be as idiosyncratic as the various needs and desires to claim space for survival. During the 19th century, the North Star was the point of orientation in a fugitive geography that positioned Canada as a refuge for AfricanAmericans escaping the slave trade, while further west, the Medicine Line seemed to hold the promise of freedom for the Plains Lakota in the American “Indian Wars” of the late 19th century. In Canada, these border crossings have become “Heritage Moments” on CBC television where Canadians act out their moral superiority for themselves over the more rapacious and bellicose Americans to their south where all political turmoil seems to emerge. Artists Alana Bartol and Camille Turner have referred to this phenomenon as a “Landscape of Forgetting” in a project involving research into slave ownership in Canada during the 19th century where “servants” were owned by law, and seen as luxury goods for wealthy families (Figure 4.3 and Figure 4.4).27 These important historical subtexts have been swept under the rug in attempts to define Canada as a nation apart from its European origins and the threat of cultural and economic annexation from American interests. Anxieties about where to draw a cultural borderline, or how to differentiate and “protect” Canada from the overriding influence of the United States is an ongoing preoccupation of Canadian art and media: until recently this division was a greater cultural preoccupation than the territorial border itself. Occasionally, these anxieties manifest in new maps, “experimental geographies” that test out imaginary scenarios, proposing an alternative geopolitical unconscious that mocks the hubris of state-centric geography. In Amendments to Continental Refusal/Refus Continental (Figure 4.5), Greg Curnoe picks up on several forms of continental anxiety

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Figure 4.3 Alana Bartol and Camille Turner, “Reading the verdict of Josiah Cutan at the river,” from Landscape of Forgetting, Neighborhood Spaces symposium, Windsor, Ontario, 2014 (photo: Brigham Bartol)

as played out in Canadian culture in the early 1970s. Curnoe’s original point of reference was the Refus Global (1948), an avant-garde political manifesto written by Montreal’s Automatistes. This manifesto is credited with launching Quebec’s modernity and its departure from the political system set in place by the Catholic Church. In the context of Quebec’s Révolution Tranquille or Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the Refus Global was a “total refusal” of the existing political structure. However, in Curnoe’s tribute to the Automatistes, the Surrealist-inspired group who wrote the manifesto, he picks up on an emergent politics of globalization in the early 1970s, refusing continental integration on American terms. At the same time, Curnoe’s manifesto and map challenge the post-war cultural imperatives set in motion by the Massey Commission of 1949, whose meaning is perhaps better conveyed in its original, long-hand title: the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. Curnoe’s satirical manifesto and map envisions a future geography of North America that overwrites the existence of the United States, and imagines Canada as governed by an absolutist program of intolerance and militarization, a program of culture war that has ceased to be purely metaphorical. In true avant-garde fashion, Curnoe outlines the manifesto in 37 points, including orders to punish Canadians of American descent and to ban all American content from the minds of people living in Canada.

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Figure 4.4 Alana Bartol and Camille Turner, Landscape of Forgetting, documents from Windsor Community Museum, Neighborhood Spaces symposium, Windsor, Ontario, 2014 (photo: Brigham Bartol)

The manifesto also proposes “erecting a 50 mile high electric fence along the old Canada–U.S. border” and clearing a “100 mile wide defoliateddepopulated zone along the old Canada–U.S. border.” In Curnoe’s reimagined geography, Mexico has reclaimed its title to the states south of the Canadian border and North America is represented entirely without recourse to the United States of America as a national entity. This situation is, ironically, the exact inverse of the geopolitical perspective of the United States within the context of North America. This picture of an exclusively Canadian military-cultural complex is one that might broadly be recognized in terms of its references to the geopolitical language of the Cold War and the radical division of Germany. In a Canadian context, however, readers of Curnoe’s manifesto will recognize the spirit of the Canadian Broadcasting Act of 1968, which developed the Canadian Radio and Television Commission and subsequent Canadian content regulations that have been challenged and debated at length ever since. Curnoe’s remapping of a Canadian cultural imaginary, however sardonic, functions as a “re-distribution of the sensible” to play upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus, through disorienting both Canada’s cultural boundaries, which were being fortified at the time, and well as discussions around North American integration, which have been ongoing since the early 1990s.

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Both the idea of the North and that of North America oscillate against one another in Canadian culture. In Canada, “nordicity” is claimed as a foil against continental integration which is seen as an extension of longstanding American imperialist ventures that were rekindled by the creation of NAFTA and solidified in the security imagination that unfolded in the decade following 9/11. Rachel Adams also reminds us that NAFTA was originally proposed by Mexican President Salinas de Gortari to escape

Figure 4.5 Amendments to Continental Refusal/Refus Continental, map of North America, Greg Curnoe, 1972 (collection of the Dalhousie Art Gallery)

Canada as the Borderline Case 113 crippling international debt, though it was brokered through a series of bilateral agreements that the US had direct control over.28 “North America is a place that few would call home,” writes Adams, an “invention of politicians and economists [rather] than the product of its inhabitants’ collective imagination.”29 This problem seems particularly acute in Canada and has been since the creation of NAFTA if not earlier; however, as calls for Canadian cultural protections faded into the background in the early 1990s, a kind of Canadiana pride has come to take its place in popular culture through a somewhat misplaced “Made in Canada” ethos that took shape in the branding of Canadian experience through consumer products such as Tim Hortons coffee or Roots clothing. The irony is that while these brands started in Canada they are now globally outsourced. However, so strong is the link between Tim Hortons and Canadian identity that it is regularly celebrated by politicians and cited in news media as an authentic, anti-elitist experience of Canadian culture. Relating two tales of Canadian “nordicity” Patricia Cormack cites a 2004 newspaper story that featured Tim Hortons as the focal point of Canadianization. The article “explained incredulously that four young Cree women visiting Nova Scotia were from such a remote area of Canada that they had not even seen a Tim Hortons.” In this odd retelling of the journey from North to South, Tim Hortons becomes the site of “community initiation” according to Cormack, a “ritualistic” coffee house that functions anthropologically as the site of assimilation for Canada’s marginalized others.30 This Northern imaginary has presented a highly selective picture of the role of the Inuit within the creation of Canada’s image, both domestically and internationally. During the 1950s and 1960s, the promotion and sale of “Eskimo” art quickly became encoded within a language of modern Canadian nationhood, where, according to Leanne Pupchek, it was appropriated as the source of an authentic, Canadian ideal of “folk” culture.31 In 1953, the federal government became directly involved in the production and distribution of Inuit art acting as arbiters of what would be acceptable for sale in southern Canada and internationally. By 1967, the year of Canada’s centennial celebrations and Montreal’s World Fair, the connection between Inuit art and Canadian national identity was so strong that the official mascot chosen for Expo 67 was the Ookpik (the Inuit word for owl) a small fuzzy owl-like toy that became wildly popular. More recently the Innuksuk, a stacked and balanced stone sculpture resembling a human figure, has continued to link Canadiana with an imagined idea of the Inuit, appearing as the icon for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as well as official public sculpture in towns and cities across the country. The problem with this alliance, writes Pupchek is that “Inuit imagery has become a synecdoche, symbolic part-for-the-whole, of Canadian identity” remaining “popular and unquestioned” well into the 21st century.32 Fostered by political and economic forces that promoted, selected and marketed the work of Inuit artists as a patriotic ideal, the needs of these communities were often in conflict with development agendas.

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The Arctic as Canada’s Frontier: From Nordicity to Norientalism Politically, the Inuit have been called upon as guarantors of Canadian sovereignty in the North, and their representational status as a central part of Canadian identity was showcased in the creation of the new Territory of Nunavut in 1999. Their role has become increasingly central to Canadian geopolitics. It is argued that the continuous, historical presence of the Inuit on lands and waterways that Canada inherited from the United Kingdom in the late 19th century has served to anchor Canadian claims to sovereignty over the Northwest Passage as melting sea ice opens up shipping channels that were not previously navigable. Canada’s sovereignty over Arctic waters has been challenged, according to Rob Huebert, Director of the Centre for Strategic and Military Studies at the University of Calgary. According to him, American and European challenges to Canada’s position will most likely become stronger as ice cover continues to melt. Huebert notes that the last official statement on the definition of internal waters from 2001 included the Inuit’s presence as the determining factor in staking Canadian claims to the Arctic: the waters of the Arctic Archipelago have been Canada’s internal waters by virtue of historical title. These waters have been used by Inuit, now of Canada, since time immemorial. Canada has unqualified and uninterrupted sovereignty over the waters.33 At stake are international claims to oil and gas exploration under the Arctic seabed as melting ice exposes the region for hydrocarbon drilling platforms. Here, the media has responded in presenting a picture of the Arctic as a site that is under siege, both as a “new frontier” for exploration and exploitation and as a matter for Canadian national pride. Heather Nicol has traced the number of Arctic-related stories that have appeared in Canadian media since the 1970s, noting that there has been a significant increase in the last 15 years. Media coverage, she writes, has resulted in a popular geopolitics, one that has been honed into a “competitive vision of international relations, in which “national Norths” figured more prominently. This “geopolitics of competition” has been cast in terms of a “direct link between climate change and insecurity.”34 By 2010, discourse around military security in the Arctic had been dubbed a new “Cold War” which began as early as 2007 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued fighting words in a speech on Arctic sovereignty where he intimated that Canada’s sovereignty over the Arctic was “besieged” urging a “use it or lose it” approach to defending national interests.35 The centrality of the Arctic to Canadian national identity and its importance as a future horizon have been played out as an announced commitment to the defense and militarization of the North. While much

Canada as the Borderline Case 115 of the proposed new government spending has not materialized, according to Nicol, it has held rhetorical importance.36 However, this renewed emphasis on Northern defense can be seen symbolically through the integration of the Canadian Rangers as an official sub-unit of the Canadian Armed Forces in 2007. Originally established as volunteer force in 1947, the Canadian Rangers role has been renewed and redefined in line with a state-centered view of the Canadian North as a frontier zone. Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has conducted eight summer tours of the North, developing the message of economic development and military security as secured through communities in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.37 In this context, the Canadian Rangers have figured prominently as a photogenic frontier force suited up in camouflage pants, bright red sweatshirts, baseball caps (Figure 4.6). Their image is a blend of old and new: a more casual version of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, kitted out with both GPS and vintage rifles. The ranks of the Canadian Rangers are predominantly Inuit, Dene and Métis, though it is not exclusively an indigenous organization.38 The status of the Canadian Rangers, in spite of their inclusion in the Canadian Army seems somewhat unresolved, and their sporty uniform seems to indicate a kind of branding exercise. Their status

Figure 4.6 Canadian Rangers, Baffin Island, Nunavut, August 24, 2014: Jamie Pillaktuaq of 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group does a test sighting to ensure that there are no obstacles on the .303 Lee Enfield rifle range at York Sound on Baffin Island, NU, during Operation Nanook (photo: Corporal Aydyn Neifer, CFJIC Deployment Team A)

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seems on a par with casual, volunteer labor, but their role as vigilantes of the North should not be underestimated in Arctic surveillance operations which have become more performative than military. Jason Dittmer posits that the role of the rangers is one of “effective occupation,” their bright red uniforms enabling them to be clearly seen against the stark white Arctic landscape. He also notes the dual value of indigenous participation which “accrues value for the Canadian state, given how Canadian sovereignty claims to the Arctic ice are dependent on Inuit occupation dating well before Canada existed.”39 Although state-centric security concerns in the Arctic are motivated by melting sea ice, response has not been forthcoming in terms of new environmental protections. As the very site of the most dramatic evidence of climate change in the northern hemisphere, the Arctic has instead become the latest frontier of exploitation in a global race to mine the planet for resources and profit. Widespread acceptance of the Anthropocene as a new epoch in geological time has been growing steadily since the concept was put forward in 2000. Thus, the conflicting image of the Arctic in a global context has produced the global North as site of dissonance. Future visions of open global shipping channels, oil and gas exploration and geoengineering projects are blithely presented as part of the grand disavowal of climate change which takes place as a kind of nihilistic race to claim Northern environments. The Arctic has thus become an existential conundrum, a site of no return. If nordicity has functioned as a quaint, galvanizing national metaphor throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, one where the North is imagined and consumed by those living in Canada’s south, the Arctic has returned as a more disquieting obsession. Where nordicity packaged the North in consumable contexts, contemporary Canadian artists have imaged the Arctic as a sublime object, where it figures as an unknowable and ungovernable site that frustrates human understanding. It is a type of aesthetic response that has emerged in tandem with growing awareness of the environmental and geopolitical challenges emerging from the physical transformation of the Arctic. The image of the North has returned in the Canadian cultural imaginary as climate change blurs sovereignty over interior and international waters and as global resource depletion puts increasing pressure on Arctic states to claim territory in the name of global security, shipping operations and hydrocarbon drilling platforms. In this context, the Arctic becomes the site of both cultural patrimony and fundamental alterity as a kind of Northern sublime. The northward gaze in contemporary Canadian culture has taken shape as a form of norientalism where the technological sublime finds a physical limit.40 In the work of contemporary artists like Sarah Anne Johnson or Charles Stankievech the Arctic returns as both a physical and technological frontier, a site of profound beauty and human folly. In Johnson’s Arctic Wonderland series she counterposes the austere image of pristine Northern landscapes/

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Figure 4.7 Bubble, Arctic Wonderland series, Sarah Anne Johnson, 2011

seascapes with the alterity of the technological sublime. The idea of the Arctic as a technological horizon is one that is grounded in historical narratives of polar expeditions, but it has recurred throughout the 20th century and most recently in the race to claim the continental shelf underneath the Arctic seabed. The images in Johnson’s Arctic series range from whimsical to intimidating, encapsulating both the notion of the North as a hedonistic playland and as a terrifying, inhuman zone of transition. Arctic Wonderland has come to stand for the recurring dilemmas of the Canadian Arctic, even though the series itself was photographed in northern Norway (see Figure 4.7). However, this detail only heightens the geopolitical tension presented in the Arctic as a kind of global non-place, an empty screen to project a terrestrial frontier for a global audience.

The View from Above: The DEW Line and the Canadian Shield These recent iterations of a Northern frontier zone in Canada stem from a highly trained geographic gaze. While Canada’s Northern temperament was firmly established as heroic and masculine by the end of the 19th century, a cohesive geographic imagination of Canadian territory did not fully emerge until the middle of the 20th century as military and geological surveys for the Distant Early Warning line and the mapping of the Canadian Shield became widely known projects that focused a northward

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gaze from the perspective of Canada’s south. Arguably, the 21st-century obsession with the North in Canadian culture was set in place by a geological imaginary that was mapped out in the 20th century, as the North became legible in the South as part of a modern technological vision. So critical was the view from above in the making of a national image in the 20th century that Athos Maxwell Narraway, the chief surveyor of Canada’s Department of the Interior encouraged Canadians to “reconsider . . . their geographical imagination,” reorienting a “national locus of vision” from a perspective based upon the earth to one “far above.”41 In the 1930s, Narraway publicly advocated for the adoption of aerial photography. He proposed a vision of the landscape that “forged a new link between technology and nation,” a vision that “resonated with Canadian industry and politicians.” Narraway’s address was a critical turning point in Canadian geography, where the nation’s modernity was directly linked to the ability to view the country from an aerial perspective. Geographers became increasingly central to the Canadian state during the 20th century as select interpreters of the aerial photograph, linking its meaning to “a particular kind of vision suited to explaining the nation” topographically and from the perspective of the North.42 After World War II, the mapping of Canada’s north became a critical state project, influenced by two key military factors. As the US and Canada agreed to establish the Distant Early Warning System in 1957 to detect missiles from the USSR, the lack of detailed maps of the region spurred the Canadian government to undertake its largest mapping project ever. In coordination with NATO agencies, new standard maps were produced at the outset of the Cold War at a level that was unprecedented at the time, according to Iain Taylor, “achieving the world’s largest standardized map coverage of a single jurisdiction.” This mapping project also coincided with the discovery of the extent of mineral resources of the Precambrian Shield, whose striking contours provided a unifying national image of Canadian geography in the post-war era.43 From this point onward, the Canadian Shield became an iconic geological symbol, promoted as the bedrock of Canadian identity. In the Illustrated History of Canada from the 1970s, for example, Barbara Moon wrote of the metaphysical connection between a Canadian temperament and the geological formation of the Canadian Shield, waxing enthusiastic about Canadians as a “shield race.”44 This is part of a Canadian “space-myth” of the true North according Rob Shields who notes that concepts like the Canadian Shield cease to function metaphorically, functioning denotatively, by contrast, through geography and geology. Thus as a form of frontier, the Canadian Shield is accorded the status of a “real, physical object rather than a feature of a historical spatialization of Canada” which at the same time provides an ontology for a Northern frontier.45 This might be where the frontier concept in a Canadian context departs from its American counterpart as a more concretized and less mobile limit.

Canada as the Borderline Case 119 Whether attached to the materiality of the Precambrian igneous rock of the Canadian Shield or the melting Arctic sea ice, the Northern frontier has exhibited a far greater pull on the Canadian imagination than the space of the Canada–US border, which is read primarily as a site of economic rather than cultural differentiation. Thus, the Canadian Shield functions as a geography of distinction, a liminal zone between South and North in Canada that turns its back on the United States and trains its gaze toward the North Pole. There are competing images of the Canadian Shield, however. The first as a landscape for wilderness recreation, as typified in the Group of Seven’s paintings and in the “Canadian Experience” Pavilion set up for the G8/20 Summits in 2010. The Shield also symbolizes and furthers the idea of Canada’s “staples economy” set into Canadian political economy by Harold Innis in the 1920s. Against these two mainstream views of the Canadian Shield, the Ojibwe artist Bonnie Devine presents a view to the Shield as a highly contested and disturbed geography. In Stories from the Shield, Devine draws upon the conflict between the extraction economies of the Shield and an indigenous perspective on energy and water seen from this same place. As intensive uranium mining was undertaken in Elliot Lake from 1953 onwards, Devine researched the environmental destruction left by the mine which poisoned the nearby Serpent River, Elliot Lake and the surrounding watershed. Devine’s multimedia installation is culled together from stories from the community of Serpent River First Nation, where the atomic age collided head-on with

Figure 4.8 Letter to William, Bonnie Devine, 2008. Graphite, yellow ochre, thread, and digital photograph on paper. (Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY)

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the Anishinaabe view to the resonance of the Shield. Devine juxtaposes this environmental history, with stories from her family and Serpent River First Nations elders to draw out an indigenous knowledge of radiation which was first imaged through the serpent as an underground energy source that was long known to the Ojibwe but held sacred, powerful and not to be disturbed (see Figure 4.8).

Other Frontiers: Canada as Outer America Ideas of the North, as both specific and imagined geographies outlined throughout this chapter, continue to hold sway over dominant cultural ideas of Canada’s position within the Americas. Canada does not have a geographic borderland region that skirts along the Canada–US border in the same way that the borderlands of South Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have emerged as a specific cultural zone along the US–Mexico border. On the surface of things, the Canada–US border–line has long been regarded as a 4,000-mile, unpopulated void. Even as the international border has become more tightly regulated, the cultural difference between Canada and the United States is generally not aligned with the international border in the same way that the US–Mexico border has been constructed as a line of difference between Spanish colonial populations (as mestizo) and American Protestant settlers. While much of the population of Canada resides near the border, the major cities of Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver are all situated at a safe distance from the line itself. The few municipalities and indigenous territories that straddle the border become notable exceptions to the representation of Canada’s border landscape, as outlined in Chapters 5 and 7. The spaces formed on or at the Canada–US border then, are often events or moments of conflict that have been spurred on by a longstanding indigenous presence that predates the border and ultimately undermines its legitimacy, calling attention to the link between the border as an instrument of settler colonialism. Mohawk artist Alan Michelson multiplies the space of the Canada–US border in suggesting that it has more than two, and at least three sides. His increasingly well known work, the Third Bank of the River, graces the interior offices of the Messina border crossing between upstate New York and Ontario, which traverses Mohawk territory along the St. Lawrence River. The panoramic view of the shoreline is rendered in alternating orientations, with skyline and horizon flipped upside down. In the photo installation, the middle ground is formed by a band of cumulus clouds. The three bands suggest both the insufficiency of the Canada–US border in creating space for Mohawk territory while at the same time visually referencing the two-row wampum belt, a historic beaded belt presented to the Dutch in the early 17th century as a gesture of diplomacy. Writing on the importance of Michelson’s work in discourses around the Canada–US border, David Stirrup suggests that the

Canada as the Borderline Case 121 binary logic around the Canada–US border is opened up in Michelson’s Third Bank of the River, where the “placement forces the transnational dialogue to be refigured through another lens, with the Mohawk at the center rather than on the periphery.” 46 It is in looking to the transnational that we might begin to understand Canada’s conflicting and at times contradictory ideas about its borders and frontiers. Whereas the northern frontier functions as a galvanizing nationalist ideal, Canada’s border with the US only becomes legible through its ambivalent sites and incidents. Americans tend to regard their borders through the fortification of national territory as a hedge against the precarity of globalization, serving to guard American identity in a way that has no figurative equivalent in Canada or Mexico. Ideas about the American invasion of Canada during the 20th century were cultural rather than military concerns. Here it is interesting to note that Mexico’s south and Canada’s north (the areas furthest from the territorial US border) are the regions that have created historic cultural identities of each nation, and these ideas persist despite the economic and political realities that have developed in the borderlands. Albert Braz writes of Canada as “Outer America” reminding us that the Americas, in a hemispheric perspective, span a continent that stretches from the South Pole to the North. Canada has historically been written off the map of the Americas, partially of its own accord and also as the US established its geopolitical backyard from the 19th century to the Cold War as one oriented toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Braz notes the centrality of the US–Mexico dichotomy in this arena as one that orients most discourses of trans-American studies. The invisibility of Canada within this situation is, according to Braz, related to the idea that Canada has seen itself as racially homogeneous. Braz looks to Métis nationalism, or “métissage” as a means to situate Canada within a hemispheric context as hybrid and mixed; having more in common with a mestizo legacy throughout the Americas than is apparent at first glance. While the Métis are but one of several hybrid groups in Canada, here they become a critical entry point to re-thinking our colonial past and thus our relationship to the Americas more generally. It is therefore in the multiple outliers, the hybrid identities and alterNative reminders that the border is not exclusively “ours” to begin with, that we might be able to rescue some of the complexity that was apparent in McLuhan’s metaphor of Canada as the “borderline” case.

Notes 1 Rob Shields, Places on the Margins: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 163. 2 Marshall McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,” in David Staines (Ed.), The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 247.

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3 Duff McDonald, “The Greedy White North: America’s Hat is America’s Twin,” New York Observer. Accessed January 15, 2015 at: http://observer. com/2013/07/the-greedy-white-north-americas-hat-is-americas-twin/# ixzz3Oq8YgFeV. At the outset of Justin Trudeau’s election in Canada in October 2015, the political and economic climate has changed dramatically. It remains to be seen to what extent the Trudeau government will participate in American security mandates. 4 Shawn McCarthy, “‘Anti-Petroleum’ Movement a Growing Security Threat to Canada, RCMP Say,” Toronto Globe and Mail, February 17, 2015. Accessed April 23, 2015 at: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/anti-petroleummovement-a-growing-security-threat-to-canada-rcmp-say/article23019252 5 Shiri Pasternak, “Occupy(ed) Canada: The Political Economy of Indigenous Dispossession,” in Kin-nda-nimi Collective (Ed.), The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future and the Idle No More Movement (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2014), 41. 6 Naomi Klein, “G20 Trials and the War on Activism,” in Tom Malleson and David Wachsmuth (Eds.), Whose Streets? The Toronto G20 Summit and the War on Activism (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2011), xiii. 7 Erika Tucker, “Ottawa Shooting Timeline: 10 Hours of Terror,” Global News, October 23, 2014. Accessed January 7, 2015 at: http://globalnews.ca/news/ 1631792/ottawa-shooting-timeline-10-hours-of-terror 8 McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,” 274. 9 McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,” 245. 10 Thomas R. Berger, “Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry” (Vol. 1: Social and Environmental Impact), Yukon Digital Archives. Accessed January 9, 2015 at: http://yukon digitallibrary.ca/digitalbook/northernfrontiersocialimpactenvironmental impact 11 Heather Nicol, “Natural News, State Discourse and the Canadian Arctic,” Arctic Yearbook, 2013, 6. 12 Janine Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan (London: Sage, 2005), 100. 13 Sarah E.K. Smith, “Cross Border Identifications and Dislocations: Visual Art and the Construction of Identity in North America,” in Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup (Eds.), Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada–US Border (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013), 187–207, 187. 14 Jody Berland, North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 52. 15 Berland, North of Empire, 49. 16 Smith, “Cross-Border Identifications,” 187. 17 Lynda Jessup, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or the More Things Change . . .,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 37: 1 (2002), 144–180, 144. 18 Graham Ferguson’s 1967 film Polar Life is important in this context. It has been remastered and will be included as Canada’s entry to Expo 2017 in Astana, Kazakhstan. http://cinemaexpo67.ca/polar-life-exhibition/ Thanks to Michael Darroch for pointing this out. 19 Joyce Zemans, “Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Program of Canadian Art,” in John O’Brian and Peter White (Eds.), Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven,

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Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 2007), 181–185, 185. Zemans, “Establishing the Canon,” 185. Peter White, “Out of the Woods” in Beyond Wilderness, 18. Shields, Places on the Margin, 178. Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, This is the Arctic, cited in Shields, Places on the Margin, 179. Shields, Places on the Margin, 174. Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7. Shields, Places on the Margin, 171. Alana Bartol and Camille Turner, “The Landscape of Forgetting: A Walk by Camille Turner and Alana Bartol,” Neighbourhood Spaces Symposium, November 14, 2014. Accessed 30 July, 2016 at: http://camilleturner.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/Handout.docx.pdf Adams, Continental Divides, 14. Adams, Continental Divides, 17. Patricia Cormack, “‘True Stories’ of Canada: Tim Hortons and the Branding of National Identity,” Cultural Sociology, 2: 3 (2008): 369–384, 70. Leanne S. Pupchek, “True North: Inuit Art and the Canadian Imagination,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 31: 1–2 (2001): 191–208, 198. The establishment of a southern market for Inuit sculpture took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Artist and filmmaker James Houston was instrumental in this process though he has been thoroughly criticized by the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter for the ways in which traditional Inuit aesthetics were manipulated and commodified to suit Western conventions of art. Edmund Carpenter, “Ivory Carvings of the Hudson Bay Eskimo,” Canadian Art, 15: 3 (1958): 212–215, 214. Pupchek, “True North,” 191. Rob Huebert, “Climate Change and Canadian Sovereignty in the Northwest Passage,” Calgary Papers in Military and Strategic Studies, Occasional Paper No. 4, “Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security: Historical Perspectives” (2011): 386–387, 389. Nicol, “Natural News,” 14. P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “Introduction to Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security: Historical Perspectives,” Calgary Papers in Military and Strategic Studies, Occasional Paper No. 4, (2011), 1. Nicol, “Natural News,” 18. James Cudmore, “Harper’s Northern Tour is about Politics as much as Policy,” CBC News, August 18, 2013. Accessed July 30, 2016 at: www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/harper-s-northern-tour-is-about-politics-as-much-as-policy-1.1326265 Lackenbauer, Whitney, P. Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security: Historical Perspectives, Calgary Papers in Military and Strategic Studies, no. 4, (2011). Accessed October 13, 2015. http://cmss.ucalgary.ca/publications/calgarypapers Jason Dittmer, Sami Moisio, Alan Ingram, Klaus Dodds, “Have You Heard the One about the Disappearing Ice? Recasting Arctic Geopolitics,” Political Geography, 30 (2011): 202–214, 209. The term “norientalism” comes from my colleague Steven Palmer, Professor of History at the University of Windsor.

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41 Matt Dyce, “Canada between the Photograph and the Map: Aerial Photography, Geographical Vision and the State,” Journal of Historical Geography, 39 (2013): 69–84, 80. 42 Dyce, “Canada between the Photograph and the Map,” 71. 43 Iain C. Taylor, “Official Geography and the Creation of Canada,” Cartographica 31: 4 (1994): 1–15, 15. 44 Barbara Moon, The Illustrated History of Canada: The Canadian Shield (Toronto: Natural Sciences of Canada, 1970), 8. 45 Shields, Places on the Margin, 184. 46 David Stirrup, “Bridging the Third Bank of the River: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada–US Border,” in Stirrup, Parallel Encounters, 182.

Part III

Modalities of Dissensus

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5

Psychogeography after NAFTA

In 2007, the artist Cesar Saez announced plans to launch a 300-metre, banana-shaped blimp into low orbit from northwestern Mexico. With prevailing winds, the blimp was expected to glide through the stratosphere over Texas for about a month. The Geostationary Banana over Texas, as the project was called, was designed to travel slowly, propelled through space along a northeastern trajectory. According to Saez, the blimp would provide a new vanishing point on the Texan horizon, a tiny apparition of a crescent moon, just barely visible on a clear day. Although this project failed to launch as planned, it garnered a significant amount of funding, media coverage and debate. In the end, it turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax. But, like much conceptual art and political theatre, it raises many questions about technological hubris and national will. Saez’s success in generating funding and media interest suggests that the Geostationary Banana over Texas struck a chord in the North American imagination: the project conjured up the twin obsessions of American frontiers, both terrestrial and astronomical in an era that has seen renewed enthusiasm for the fortification of American territory. While the Geostationary Banana drew attention for its combination of humor and hubris, the project also alluded to more terrestrial matters. In the conceptual drawings for the project, the banana was represented hovering directly over the US–Mexico border at a time when the US congress had just passed the Secure Fence Act in 2006. Though the Geostationary Banana never took flight, it provided a means for reflecting on the origins of a fortress culture responsible for the new border walls and suggested the Sisyphean nature of the project laid out in the Secure Fence Act. If the Geostationary Banana suggested anything directly, it is that the strip of land called the border can never be sealed off in the way that security experts imagine and that movement (human, environmental and economic) continues across, underneath or above the wall in both clandestine and official capacities. Saez’s project referenced the complex histories of traffic, trade and circulation that constitute North American geopolitical relations from the 19th-century re-territorialization of Texas, through the Banana Wars

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(1898–1934) and finally the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994). The Geostationary Banana project reminded us that bananas are not grown in Texas though they have become the quintessential American fruit. This sly commentary on histories of trade and immigration suggests that the received policy view of the border, as a protective boundary around the nation state, is hopelessly naïve and wildly xenophobic. Saez is not alone in creating an indirect commentary on American border policy. In the last decade, numerous art and activist projects have launched critiques of border control through tracing and tracking various networks of transnational circulation in North America. From Ricardo Dominguez’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that distributed a GPS cell phone application to migrants to help navigate the hostile cross-border territory of the Sonoran Desert, to the coordinated efforts of the 2013 Idle No More protests, which temporarily shut down parts of the Canada–US border, there has been a circulatory turn of contemporary practices that challenge the partitioning and control of territory in North America as a hemispheric region. These works do not expressly call for the eradication of borders as such; rather they demonstrate that people and things continue to move across borders, however imposing and inhumane they have become, thereby challenging their legitimacy. They make visible the operations of power, control and censorship that have emerged from the bordering processes of the last 20 years, those that leverage income disparity by establishing sanctioned and clandestine networks of circulation. These forms of circulation have been labeled opposing pairs: legal versus illegal; goods versus people; trade versus migration. But both channels of circulation function in less than obvious ways, not easily seen or witnessed. In tracing and tracking movement across various North American border zones, the projects discussed in this chapter call attention to the social, environmental and economic forms of circulation at work, forces that are often opposed, though they collectively undermine the certainty and solidity of the edifice built by the Department of Homeland Security over the last decade. The dominant policy concept of the border has failed, though it remains popular as it maintains what Jacques Rancière calls an “insecurity principle” that has informed the logic of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the unprecedented expenditures on national security, much of which is directed toward patrolling the border. Rather than responding to situations of instability, the insecurity principle operates through maintaining or even perpetuating a “sentiment of insecurity,” which he adds wryly is “necessary to the functioning of good states.”1 Borders have been fortified and thickened in North America in ways that serve to foster insecurity, working to partition the world into zones of uncertainty, volatility and potential danger that are supposedly contained by an increasingly militarized perimeter. This process has often been referred to as “re-bordering”, after a period in the 1990s when national borders were seen to be obsolete.2

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New World Borders Many cultural analyses over the last decade have pointed to a correlation between increased global circulation and domestic malaise in the United States expressed as anxiety and insecurity. As early as 2003, Amy Kaplan wrote of the unprecedented use of the term “homeland” in naming the Department of Homeland Security, which was the largest reorganization of the American government in 50 years. Kaplan found no direct precedent in American cultural history, though its folksy Germanic tones, she suggests, are readily apparent in the language of National Socialism of the 1930s.3 The importance of this semantic shift that results from the choice of the term “homeland” to refer to matters of national security cannot be overestimated as the concept introduces a sense of nostalgia for an imagined home that is lost or inaccessible, a purist notion of an innocent past. Through a nostalgic appeal to the notion of a homeland, a measure of defensiveness emerges: home becomes “something a larger power threatens to occupy or take away, and one has to fight to regain.”4 This discourse of security centered on an imagined homeland cultivates insecurity in North American relations where appeals to resurgent nationalism have been played out around the site of the border. As the notion of home becomes increasingly foggy within advanced capitalist states, attachments to ideas about belonging are amplified in response to the perceived threats from outside (immigration from the global South as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Nicholas Mirzoeff links the image world of the 21st-century American domestic sphere to “circulation anxiety,” tracing contemporary patterns of circulation, enabled by the SUV and the McMansion, as domestic circuits sealed off from the outside world. Not only are both the SUV and the McMansion made possible from a global petro-culture, Mirzoeff reads these atomized spaces as examples of circulation anxiety pointing out that the very partial view to the war in Iraq was often received domestically on super-sized entertainment centers or embedded screens in oversized vehicles.5 The suburban, vernacular locations for the reception of images from recent wars in the Middle East cannot be discounted, as the first decade of the 21st century ushered in a highly coordinated and technocratic form of globalization that has enabled the greatest degree of movement for capital while limiting the movement of individuals to the “circulation of domestic consumption.”6 This dissonance produces a new anxious visual subject, one who sees foreign military campaigns unfold as background noise on multiple screens, while circulating in an increasingly securitized and homogeneous suburban environment. Both Kaplan and Mirzoeff take the first decade of the 21st century as a critical turning point in the narrative of globalization and American foreign policy, where the disjunction between home territory and foreign occupation forms a troubling gap that cannot be sustained. Building on

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their analyses, I want to consider how the American border itself was reframed and re-invented during this period as the site that negotiates these anxieties, subsuming them under the sign of security itself. In the disjuncture between the domestic and the global, the role of the border has expanded and changed. In less than a decade, the concept of the border shifted dramatically from something considered to be an old-world inconvenience, a remnant of the Cold War out of step with the meteoric rise in information technology and new economic trade agreements, to an essential structural mechanism that not only protects the nation, but also redefines its spatial parameters. The celebratory notion of the borderless world of the 1990s was first pitched as evidence that capitalism was the logical heir to the world, having won the great battle against socialism. The demise of the nation state went hand in hand with the triumph of digital capital: heady proclamations of virtual travels on the information superhighway were heard frequently, finding voice most recently though Thomas Friedman’s so-called “flat world” of global competition and commerce. But these celebratory and prophetic narratives were supplanted by those of fear and terror quite abruptly after 9/11 and the attitude toward the world of global flows and circulation has been tempered by suspicion in the last decade. Circulation, networks and flows are among the dominant metaphors of globalization; their expression in North America has emerged in two key political moments: the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. These two versions of the US border present multiple contradictions that create an ongoing crisis: the economic policy that produced a vision of North America as trade bloc in the 1990s, where borders become instruments to leverage production costs, has more recently collided with that of the security state established after 2001. Contemporary American borders are thus produced and maintained as zones of crisis managed by technological and bureaucratic strategies that tie into a vast security-industrial complex. The architect, Fernando Romero, calls this iteration of the US–Mexico border the “hyperborder” a kind of turbo-charged space of exchange.7 This re-framing of the border also works as a continental traffic management strategy, enabling the free flow of goods and capital while limiting human movement. These contradictions now accommodated in the border are often glossed over in matters of official policy. The Smart Border Agreement between Canada and the US introduced in 2002 and the Security and Prosperity Partnership between Canada, the US and Mexico (2005) attempt to reconcile these opposing views through engineering, on a continental scale, what Gilles Deleuze has called “control spaces.”8 The new world borders that have been established in North America place symbolic importance on the physical site of the line, while at the same time re-configuring and distributing the sites of border control as larger networks of circulation,

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 131 those that track and regulate the manufacture and distribution of goods destined for consumption. There is a visual interplay at work in and around the border between what is in plain sight—the highly visible wall and military infrastructure—and what is hidden or shuttered off from view. The visible border is positioned as a crisis and a line of sight, evident at points of entry especially when long lines of traffic form, waiting to be processed by armed guards. It is also apparent on network television, from news reports of violence in border cities, to series such as Homeland Security USA, The Bridge and Border Wars (discussed in Chapter 2), network television programing that reinforces the border as a crisis. The crisis-border grabs our attention and maintains the site as an ongoing state of emergency. But it also screens out a labyrinthine network of economic circulation: goods from Mexican maquiladoras and Canadian branch plants, operations that are largely invisible to the public, closed off in post-industrial spaces and in legions of transport trucks that continually move through transnational trucking corridors that span Mexico, the United States and Canada. Pipelines and trains trading in dirty oil from the Alberta Tar Sands move quietly across the Canada–US border. And prisons in Texas and Arizona fill with undocumented people who wait for years to be repatriated.9 Along with the highly visible crisis-border, the occluded circulatory networks of trade in North America form a specific configuration, a “distribution of the sensible” to use Rancière’s lexicon, that frames what can be seen and heard. Border infrastructure and transnational supply chain networks have been recalibrated to seamlessly facilitate trade across the border even as security has increased in the last decade. But NAFTA also set in motion an economic domino effect, producing shadow economies that operate through other channels. Before the global recession took effect in 2008, much of Mexico’s GDP was based upon remittances from seasonal workers who left for the US to find legitimate agricultural employment when it seemed that all that was left growing on Mexican soil after NAFTA devastated local corn production was marijuana, “the crop that pays.”10 As traditional farming collapsed in Mexico due to cheap imports of American corn, the flow of undocumented migrants entering the United States increased significantly. While much is made of the so-called invasion of “illegal aliens” from Mexico and Latin America (think specifically of widely circulated images of young men scaling the border fence), we don’t often see images of those who don’t make it in their attempts to traverse the Sonoran Desert between northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States. As urban ports of entry became more guarded in the 1990s, the trek across the desert has become the preferred route for migrants seeking entry into the American economy. While crossing has become a small industry in itself, it is not one that leaves much of a trace. In the cat-and-mouse game between migrants and American border patrol, the signs of those who make it into the US are

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meticulously hidden. Jason De León points out, black water jugs have been manufactured in Mexico for transport through the desert as transparent plastic ones reflect sunlight that can be detected by surveillance cameras.11 Canvas shoe covers with shag carpet on the bottom to obscure footprints have been dubbed narco-booties by the Minutemen vigilantes that collect them in stretches of the Arizona desert, but it is doubtful that much of the billion-dollar trade in street drugs enters on the backs of people seeking work in the US. Thousands of people have died attempting to cross through the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts that span the US–Mexico border. Exact figures are difficult to estimate as bodies decompose quickly in the heat of the desert. The Undocumented Migration Project began in 2009 in response to the rise in numbers of migrant deaths along this border as a result of the US Border Patrol’s Prevention through Deterrence program that was established in 1994, the same year NAFTA took effect. According to Jason De León, director of the project, the Prevention through Deterrence program has failed to deter unauthorized migration, creating in its stead a vast network of human smuggling that has emerged as “a well-organized and violent social process with a unique set of material culture and technologies”.12 An archeological project at base, it is this material culture that is collected and catalogued in order to shed light on the scale of clandestine border crossing between Mexico and the United States, and to sort out better estimates of how many people have lost their lives while crossing. While bodies have been collected on both sides of the border, many disappear completely as their remains are quickly dispersed and scavenged by vultures. The Undocumented Migration Project uses anthropological methods to piece together specific information about who crosses and how crossing strategies are refined. Most importantly it serves to corporealize a process that is either abstracted through numbers or sensationalized through images. The material culture, by contrast, enables a different view: When we look at a broken-down pair of shoes or an empty bottle, we get some insight into one person’s subjective experience of having their feet torn to shreds by the desert or their body becoming dehydrated. The bottles refilled with green cattle water and the shoes urgently patched together become striking material residues of desperation. Failure to carry out a crossing technique or repair a tool can mean failure to avoid Border Patrol or, worse, to save one’s life.13 This forensic approach to undocumented migration requires sorting through vast amounts of discarded items left behind in the desert: thousands of backpacks containing clothes and personal effects, water bottles and shoes, each item bearing clues to its owner’s eventual fate. These items accumulate as trash in the cattle washes in ranch lands along the border, which become filled with debris after periods of heavy rain.

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 133 States of Exception (January 13–March 12, 2013) an exhibition curated by Amanda Kruglaik, brought together artifacts and field notes from the Undocumented Migration Project.14 Here these lost and discarded backpacks covered the main entry wall of the gallery space (Figure 5.1). The packs were stiff and musty from the combination of sweat, heat and rain. But the brand names and styles served as an uncanny reminder of an uncomfortably shared consumer culture, one designed in the US, manufactured in Asia and exported around the world. Corporate logos from Nike, Adidas, Dora the Explorer and Homer Simpson, were on display too, implicated in a web of projection and desire that connects the desperate conditions of global labor with its end products, products that are normally divorced from their making. This backpack wall was flanked by vitrines with neatly displayed canned food, toiletries and other items that were never consumed as planned. The exhibition strayed far from the conventions of archeology: it featured a video documenting emotional accounts from field researchers who found it difficult to talk about the remains they encountered. Across the gallery, a wall projection of a nighttime patrol along the border fence by video artist Richard Barnes played as a backdrop in a darkened room with dramatically lit artifacts.

Figure 5.1 States of Exception, installation created by Richard Barnes and Amanda Krugliak based upon the archive of Jason De León, University of Michigan Institute for Humanities, 2013 (photo: Richard Barnes)

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Migrant deaths play into a representational quandary, a spectrum of visibility and invisibility created around the border. The clandestine infrastructure of migrant labor has been channeled by the failures of NAFTA and the fissures left open through Prevention through Deterrence. And the differential flow created by privileging the flow of goods over people has left a standing reserve of low-wage workers who are left to negotiate a contradictory patchwork of US policy that has emerged since 1994.15 The 19th-century bloodshed and violence that created the frontier, and subsequently the geographical boundaries of the United States, are still routinely celebrated and dramatized in endless variations on the western. This historicized violence is implicitly used as justification for the Secure Fence Act and Prevention through Deterrence. But the violence set in motion by these strategies is at best regarded as an unfortunate side effect of these programs and does not register as such. On the other hand, the brutality perpetrated by drug cartels in their quest to control trade routes to the US has been cast as a border war in the media: the death toll from cartel massacres is easily blamed on Mexico and Latin America, even though the munitions and market forces originated in the US. But the death toll from desert migration, a consequence of Prevention through Deterrence, is not readily called violence. Migrant deaths in the desert fall under the category of “slow violence,” a form of violence that Rob Nixon has traced in the environmental degradation of the global South, where toxic trash is shipped and dumped without regulation. Slow violence takes place indirectly over decades and it is not commonly represented in the media. It is often acknowledged but rarely acted upon. The uncertainty around numbers of undocumented people working in the US is of the same order as the uncertainty of numbers of those who died trying enter. Giorgio Agamben has called this “bare life,” the category of the undocumented worker or the unidentifiable remains in the desert become part of the same lacuna that cannot be accurately counted or quantified. In a very different vein, Jacques Rancière has said “whoever is nameless cannot speak,” referring to an overarching distribution of the sensible that he has condensed in the shorthand term “the police.”16 Rancière’s reorientation of the terms of aesthetics and politics is especially useful in rethinking the insurmountable issues that fall under the sign of the border. His syntax, however, is not readily adaptable: the relationship he establishes between “politics” and “police” is oppositional, yet these concepts cannot be taken at face value without significant qualification. Taking Rancière’s work outside of the arena of contemporary French politics or ancient Rome, the two primary sites of analogy he employs, immediately throws up challenges as his language stretches the common terms of “police” and “politics” well beyond their everyday use. The police is the law that allocates “ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying . . . it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 135 another as noise.” While Rancière’s work is informed by Michel Foucault, he stresses that policing is not simply the “disciplining of bodies.” The gulf between biopower and bare life that Giorgio Agamben has established in the wake of Foucault is implicitly addressed by Rancière when he redirects our attention to the basis of the sensible realm in looking at relations of equality and inequality. So rather than using the terms of the “state apparatus” or “biopower”, Rancière locates power through its distributions. The police therefore operate as “a ‘rule’ governing appearances, as a ‘configuration of occupations’ designating properties of space”.17

Policy as Police: Circulation and the Sensible Transposing this language to the operations of the border is an interesting challenge, not least because Rancière’s political unit is based on the city or state rather than international or transnational relations. To place Rancière’s thought on the border, is to extend the distribution of the sensible out beyond the frame of the nation, to the export-processing zone, the protectorate, colony or occupied territory. It is also to call attention to the relations between what is generally referred to as policy—legislation, acts of congress and trade agreements that govern the border—and to reframe this in terms of what Rancière calls police, reading policy as an interrelated series of events that establishes what can and cannot be seen, and how the border is framed as something greater than the sum of its parts. The border has come to be positioned as a kind of natural law that sanctions some forms of movement while prohibiting others. It is an institution that “protects the nation” while at the same time distributing and leveraging transnational operations that have largely become invisible or outside the frame. Rancière’s vague yet provocative appellation “the police” is not merely a reference to military, security or other constabulary forces. Rather, as Samuel Chambers writes, the police should be regarded in terms of the way in which it “arranges reality,” distributing “people and things into locations and roles.”18 This re-visioning of the police as an arrangement of reality (not merely border patrol or walls) is conceived in opposition to politics, and this relationship can be seen as a temporal one, where “police” is an ongoing operation that maintains a specific sensible order, everything that “can be seen, heard and said” and politics becomes the extraordinary event that changes the “distribution of the sensible” which is disrupted and altered. Reading the contemporary US border through a Rancièrian lens is a proposition that risks oversimplification as Rancière’s reading of the police has prompted much discussion, opening more questions than its bluntness might initially suggest. The actual police of the border, Customs and Border Patrol, as much as they are implicated in maintaining national order, are only secondary actors. And the instances of politics considered here are not of a revolutionary order: this is where contemporary art and media

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projects, events and demonstrations activate and make visible the patterns of transnational circulation that operate as by-products of the border. Mentioned only briefly by Rancière, circulation is an overlooked third term between police and politics. In “Ten Theses on Politics,” he cites the police slogan, “move along there’s nothing to see” as a means to break up demonstrations and keep things moving as usual. This passage has been cited extensively as a shorthand reference to Rancière’s thought. In recent years, there has been frequent occasion to quote “move along there’s nothing to see” with the magnitude of protests that have taken place around the world, from the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto to the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements of 2011. “Move along there’s nothing to see” is a parody that at once draws upon Louis Althusser’s theatre of interpellation and tropes of traffic police at the scene of an accident, swiftly collapsing the idea of circulation with that of the police. It also activates a scene of recognition that is disavowed by the police, where attention and lines of sight are redirected and refocused, set back on track. Rancière elaborates: “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.” Rancière’s theatre of operations, like Louis Althusser’s and Guy Debord’s before him, is that of the street, but this prohibition on looking, gazing or gathering that is set by the police is by no means straightforward. “Nothing to see here” suggests that one has arrived at the scene too early or too late, that there was something to see, or there might be something to see, just don’t bother waiting around for it. The space of circulation that Rancière mentions is a distribution of the sensible, one that becomes deeply entrenched though its repetition: like a highway or an airport, it appears mundane, anti-spectacular, and must remain so to keep things moving, business as usual. But it also has the potential for disruption. This disruption is where politics happens according to Rancière: “Politics by contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving along’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject. . . . It consists in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it.”19 On July 15, 2011 Border Haunt, a project by media artist Ian Alan Paul, went live as a 24-hour, online project that merged two public databases with records of cross-border migrant traffic. The first, maintained by the Arizona Daily Star, recorded the names and descriptions of people who have died crossing the border, while the second was maintained by a private company, BlueServo, that used crowd-sourced reports of migrant sightings along crossing routes to aid Customs and Border Patrol in its apprehensions. Border Haunt was initially set up as a one-day intervention, a website that invited its participants to destabilize two networks that are deeply interrelated, but opposed in terms of their motivations. According to the project’s website, 667 people from 28 different countries

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 137 participated in the online collective action by sending in the names of the deceased to BlueServo’s website, thereby flooding it with reports of people who are no longer there. Ian Alan Paul referred to the intervention as a “database collision,” one that performs a “conceptual and symbolic” haunting of the US–Mexico border.20 Border Haunt introduces critical questions on how a bordered subject appears or disappears, gets named, counted or miscounted. In this project, the undocumented subject and the illegal object are competing figures within the ongoing controversy of the border, where there is always something to see, however fleeting. And the police recognize that we can no longer be encouraged to move along, assuaged by the idea that there’s nothing to see. The public’s gaze is focused in a selective manner: there is only one way to look, obsessively and compulsively toward the border, which is out there at the edges of the geographic imagination of the US, but also available everywhere through inland checkpoints, and online citizen patrol. The surveillance and tracking apparatus of the border electronically reproduces the standard view of the border as a site of crisis. It has become a magnet of visuality and a horizon of patriotic affiliation. Participants on BlueServo’s website volunteered to be “virtual deputies”: one describes his addition to the site as a daily ritual. When the site ceased to operate in 2013, angry posts appeared in various blogs speculating that a government conspiracy had shut down the site.21 But the crowd-sourced surveillance culture that emerged after 9/11 was a program of participatory vigilance encouraged by the Department of Homeland Security, as discussed in Chapter 2. Louise Amoore has called this a form of “vigilant visuality,” a program of watchful behavior that is part of the War on Terror to report suspicious activity as a participatory project. Border watching has become a popular trend in this context, a new kind of American spectator sport. The popularity of border watching was manifest in BlueServo’s project, but the trend stems from the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, an organization that originated in Arizona in 2004 that has spread northward to states on the Canadian border including Washington, New Hampshire, Michigan and Vermont. In the town of Blaine, Washington, directly across the US–Canada border from White Rock, British Columbia, the Smuggler’s Inn, a restaurant and bar, caters to tourists through Prohibition-era-themed rooms with views that look out toward Canada. But the quaint stereotypes based in nostalgic references to rum running are an initial allusion only, as each room comes equipped with night-vision goggles so that guests can watch the Canadian border as a part of their stay. The anxious visual subject described by Mirzoeff is no longer limited to the southern border as the northern frontier offers endless possibilities for the active imagination. An unremarkable landscape image of the border between British Colombia and Washington State on the Minutemen’s website features a cultivated vineyard though the caption that describes it suggests treacherous territory: “farms abut the Canadian

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border and the people coming down illegally from Canada can hide between the rows of berry or nut bushes.” Although the Minutemen distance themselves from government operations, the institutionally sanctioned program of border vigilance has fostered participatory forms of watching that promote delusions. The apparitional quality of border patrol is heightened in the 24-hour “database collision” played out in Border Haunt. The project’s insertion of the border’s ghosts into the surveillance apparatus is a first-class act of hauntology, the specters of both Derrida and Marx brought to bear on the question of being-in-the border. But where the separation barriers, fences and walls mark a territory that fixes time and place in a territory that has been rebranded as the “homeland,” Border Haunt brings the recent past into full sight and by extension a time when migration was not branded as a criminal act.

Inverted Geography: Overturning the Map Cesar Saez’s Geostationary Banana, Ian Alan Paul’s Border Haunt and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “circulation anxiety” can all be read as part of a general “circulatory turn” of contemporary cultural practice. This turn has emerged in response to the rise of mobile and locative media, GPS systems and Google Earth, which have reoriented the terms of the traditional map. Ironically, as maps have become dispersed and networked, the US borderline became increasingly physical and entrenched, taken out of historical context as if set in place by an act of God. In looking at how circulation takes place, our understanding of space becomes temporal, transitory and unbound from conventions of cartography. Will Straw notes the extent to which ideas of circulation have taken hold in urban studies, building on and perhaps even supplanting the influence of the Situationists whose work has had more impact in the last decade than it did when it was first published in the 1960s.22 By extension, the larger geographical territory of the border has often been recast in psychogeographic terms as a means to reorient the production of space in and around the border and to make claims on an increasingly militarized and alienating environment that has become a dislocated non-place or a remnant between the official spaces of the nation. If the desert has become a cipher for the frontier of the past, a place that is beyond control where chance dictates who survives, it has also become a one of the few remaining sites of walking in a vast region that has been engineered to accommodate specific vehicles. Here trucks and cars, drones and helicopters become the only legitimate means to traverse the terrain. It is risky to romanticize a migrant’s trek across the desert, but the limits it places on human endurance has made it a central subject of border narratives. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, a well-known locative media project by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre, trades in these narratives

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 139 but, in doing so, it re-orients our methods of aid and emergency, lending a form of aesthetic agency to the experience of crossing that is normally denied. This GPS technology is designed to assist people crossing the Mexico–US border: distributed through low-end phones or as a downloadable application, it enables crossers to locate water cache locations in the desert set up by the humanitarian groups, Water Stations Incorporated and Border Angels. The Transborder Immigrant Tool also includes poetry for “psychic counseling, spoken words of encouragement and welcome.” Both Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez, members of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT), note that the ethics and aesthetics of working in this zone of emergency are as critical to the sustenance of “transborder justice” as water is to the survival of someone walking through the desert. The Transborder Immigrant Tool holds open the subjectivity of global citizenship, not just for CEOs and diplomats, but for those whose lives are constrained and contested by the global order, what Dominguez has called “globalization-as-borderization”.23 Amy Sara Carroll further suggests that the multiple possibilities of the acronym GPS as both Global Positioning System and Global Poetic System allow a “disturbance” of the border, those that pick up on the “minor signals” and “lower frequencies” that contribute to a “geo-aesthetics” of the nano-scale.24 This barely visible and barely audible resonance is one that unseats the border as a specific distribution of the sensible; it works against what Rancière would call the police or what Debord would call the dominant planning ideology that the Situationists attacked in the form of the map. For his part, Dominguez refers to the border in much starker terms, recalling Jean Baudrillard’s “desert of the real,” whose hard simulations “seek to target and kill.” The dislocative poetics employed by the Transborder Immigrant Tool, however, function less like weapons and more like interference. Dominguez recalls the threats he received when he was under investigation by Republican Congressmen and the FBI Office of Cyber Crimes in 2010–2011 for his work on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, noting specifically Glenn Beck’s anger at a poem written by the EDT, a remix of writings by the Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa. The poem’s opening line, “We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks,” reorients the familiar terms of the immigration debate through recalling indigenous views of the borderlands that pre-date the hardened militarized division.25 Glenn Beck’s outrage and the investigation of Dominguez and EDT recall the culture wars of the 1990s, and the censorship debates that brought about cuts to artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The puritanical tenor of both periods suggests that the work of dissensus as performed by the EDT has gained traction. That censorship is called upon in both instances as a response to the threat posed by a work of art, suggests the failure or inability of the “police” to frame or manage the divisions of the sensible through its established lines of sight. The controversy over EDT also conveys an important distinction between acts

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of resistance and modalities of dissensus. Rancière tends to privilege dissensus over resistance, referring to its capacity to “modify the coordinates of the sensible, a spectacle or a tonality that replaces another.”26 Resistance and dissensus are political strategies that often overlap in critical ways, but dissensus shifts the field of perception just enough to demonstrate “a gap in the sensible itself.”27 This distinction is perhaps more productive than the endless debate over where activism ends and art begins. In the growing corpus of writing by and about Rancière, there is little that speaks directly to the subject of borders. And it would be naïve to suggest that something called “border art” would fill a prescription of what Rancière aims toward when he speaks of politics and aesthetics. He notes, however, that contemporary art is “more and more about matters that traditionally belonged to politics” at the same time taking issue with the idea that art strives to reach the real as a goal of political commitment. Rancière claims that real does not exist as such, though the “framing or fiction of reality” does. Art “does politics” by inventing fictions that challenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional, and in doing so forms new political “communities of sense.” Here, he suggests a direct correlation between the “aesthetics of politics” and the “politics of aesthetics”: doing art means displacing the borders of art, just as doing politics means displacing the borders of what is recognized as the sphere of the political. It is no coincidence that some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territories and borders.28 This passage suggests that the gulf that has conventionally separated the geographer and the artist is no longer important, that they can be co-equal in challenging the relationship between the real and the fictional and in shifting the authority of the map. The spatial and temporal coordinates embedded in any given geo-location within the borderlands are available to use for different ends—as surveillance or as aid, to disorient or direct. Thus geo-aesthetics as geopolitics arranges a “community of sense” that reframes what is typically pitched as a “commonsense” attitude about what the border is supposed to do. If the Transborder Immigrant Tool and Border Haunt activate communities of sense that disturb the border they also reference a Situationist legacy, one that was perhaps left unfinished in the 1960s at the level of the street. The Situationists praised walking as a process that disoriented the familiar spaces of capital, going against the speed and efficiency brought on in the post-war configuration of urban space. The dérive offered an avenue out of this space of circulation by slowing down its pace, placing the pedestrian as a troubling figure at the center of a world that was increasingly ordered by labor and consumption. Transposing the poetics of walking to the space of the border alters its terms: this is not the leisurely stroll of the Parisian dérive, but the determined trek of

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 141 migration driven by the needs of survival in a world that has been increasingly oriented to service the global North. These projects are psychogeographic insofar as they activate an uncanny resonance in the taught space of the hyperborder, disturbing the smooth functioning of global logistics and surveillance by demonstrating that freeways and ports of entry are not the only means of circulation between north and south. While the map of the US–Mexico border has, with a few exceptions, remained unchanged since 1848, a new cartographic imagination has been activated by the building blitz of the so-called separation barrier as well the surveillance and security apparatus that stretches out well beyond the control spaces of contemporary borderlands. The spatial configurations of a globalized world have become increasingly baroque and complex; conversely, American land borders have become over-determined and simplified, medieval edges that separate good from evil, safety from threat. This imaginary space exists in an inverse relationship to the increased sophistication of current mapping and information technologies, those employed domestically within the US as well as in foreign intelligence work. But, in spite of the ubiquity of global positioning devices and powerful mapping technologies, the horizon of the world has drawn inward.

Continental Traffic Management The pedestrian crossings between Mexico and the US are among the few charms left on a border which is now supersized to meet the needs of a growing security-industrial complex in North America. But there are still old sidewalks and turnstiles along some of the ports of entry that accommodate the many foot passengers who still walk across the border when most traffic now moves by car or truck. Walking across the border between El Paso and Juárez on the Paso del Norte bridge, one of the oldest crossings between Mexico and the US, one encounters a series of downtrodden commercial spectacles set up for American tourists, tourists that no longer walk or take day trips to Mexico in quite the same way that they once did. The most prominent image that welcomes people entering Mexico on this bridge seems to be more recent, however (see Figure 5.2). A map of the Americas depicted on its side features the faces of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Pancho Villa among other Latino revolutionary figures which become points of orientation along a political archipelago that omits the power or influence of the United States: “Aqui comienza la rebildia Latino America” (here begins the rebellion of Latin America).29 This map adorns the Mexican side of a concrete drainage ditch built to contain the humbled Rio Grande. The path of the river has long been displaced and the concrete structure serves as a surrogate boundary, its basin running dry much of the year, leaving its banks as a series of billboardsized canvases for political murals that are, most likely, not sanctioned by either the US or Mexican government. In many ways, this mural presents

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Figure 5.2 Drainage ditch mural under Bridge of the Americas, Juárez, Mexico, 2008 (photo: Lee Rodney)

a familiar picture of revolutionary politics, but it also serves as a reminder that the Zapatista movement was launched on the very same day that NAFTA was signed into agreement in 1994. In presenting a picture of the Americas on its side, the centrality and importance of the United States is no longer self-evident, appearing only as a flaccid lump on the lefthand side. The cement riverbed that separates the cities of Juárez and El Paso was put in place in the 1960s. It is an artifact left from the resolution to the Chamizal dispute, a century-long disagreement over where to place the border after the Rio Grande had shifted its course in the middle of the 19th century, thus putting in play the international boundary survey of 1848. During this period, a portion of the border had been split when a channel engineered to control flooding had created Cordoba Island, a land mass between the two countries that became a grey zone of commercial activity, most notably during Prohibition in the 1930s. The dispute over this territory was only resolved in 1963 when President Kennedy offered to honor recommendations of an international tribunal held over 50 years earlier in order to broker new economic arrangements between the US and

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 143 Latin America through the Alliance for Progress, a controversial development program which was short-lived. The Programa Nacional Fronterizo, or ProNaF period began at this time and developed into the Border Industrialization Program that established the transnational exportprocessing zones that we are familiar with today.30 That this sideways map of revolution in the Americas finds prime real estate on a surface left bare by an earlier spatial engineering project suggests a subtle irony in the competing views of the continent. At the US port of entry, the map serves as a disorienting gesture, an inversion of the hierarchical orientation implied by the standard textbook geographyof the continental United States. The map offers a view from the middle of the Americas rather than a top-down perspective. Like the maps used in the Geostationary Banana over Texas, we are presented with a competing spatial imagination of the continent, one that forces a view from below, or from within a new geography that is not divided by the same tensions. If these mappings seem capricious it is because they question the logic of existing territorial arrangements and proposed continental traffic management schemes that are equally unreal in their scope. In the neoliberal picture of globalization, the desire for the uninterrupted flow of goods from the South overshadows the major upheavals that have resulted from new international trade routes that efficiently block human movement while expediting the flow of goods. In this picture, the transportation of goods is decoupled from the deterritorialized migrant labor that the free trade zones in Northern Mexico have produced. The US–Mexico border has thus become a complex zone of political intensity, one that has yielded engineering proposals for continental traffic management of unimaginable proportions. The North American Supercorridor Coalition (NASCO) is a business organization that advocates for the development of transnational transportation infrastructure. Their 2013 annual report highlights their efforts to “improve and secure the supply chain” in order to develop the “most competitive transportation network on earth.” NASCO proposes an immense transportation and logistics empire that spans the continent, a sort of goods pipeline to expedite transport truck traffic from Central America and Mexico through the US and Canada. In their own rationale, NASCO was established to accommodate what it anticipates as a “trade tsunami” in its 2009 report: one can imagine truckloads of auto parts, cell phones, toilets and refrigerators filling ditches along North American interstate systems after the tsunami landed. As an organization, NASCO has fashioned its own highly simplified maps of the continent that use strong diagonal bands and large directional arrows moving from the interior of Mexico through the Midwestern United States and into Saskatchewan and Ontario. What is curious about NASCO is that it calls upon our ability to imagine the continent otherwise, as a post-national, abstract space populated only by goods, containers and vehicles. This vision of the continent as a simplified

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and streamlined network of trade corridors, coupled with the large-scale border reconstruction projects of recent years suggests conceptual parallels with the major shifts in urban space that took place in post-war culture. Cultural geographers such as Mike Davis and Kristin Ross have analyzed the controlling effects of modern, post-war planning schemes in cities in France and the United States. Their methodology is equally appropriate to forecasting the future spatial logic of globalization as it manifests in the virtual Hausmannization of continental super-corridors. The technique of widening boulevards that accommodated the control of increasing urban populations in the 19th century has been expanded beyond recognition and used in spatial planning at the continental level and beyond. The Geostationary Banana over Texas trades in the language of supercorridors in calling up two dominant colonizing narratives of American history of the 20th century, those that were established prior to NAFTA and the so-called War on Terror. The floating fruit references the glory days of American space exploration in the 1960s, while implicating the geopolitical relations between the United States and Central America that were set in motion through the “Banana Wars” of the early part of the 20th century. If American interests in world oil production can be understood as a root cause for the so-called War on Terror, the banana was historically a scapegoat for territorial protection and American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America during the early part of the 20th century. As the 21st century was opened by Operation Iraqi Freedom and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the early 20th century was marked by the Banana Wars of 1898–1934.31 As a result of American interests in Latin America that were secured, large-scale banana plantations established during the first half of the 20th century have become foundational to the transnational agribusiness supply chain that delivers cheap bananas to American suppliers. Flight simulations of the space-bound banana that were featured on the project’s website displayed images of the ripened fruit flying across the North American continent. These video clips, cobbled together from the visual languages of flight simulation, Google Earth, and meteorology provided a spirited, 21st century rejoinder to Newton’s apple and the aeronautics industry. There were also several landscape views of the wayward banana as seen from the ground where imaginary Texans, in pickups and on horseback, looked off into the distance, mystified by the spectacle in the sky. These cartoonish landscapes of the western frontier suggested paranoid fantasies of alien invasion that have been a staple of American popular culture from the National Enquirer to the X-Files. One image stands apart from the cartoon renderings and suggests a slightly more sophisticated reference point in Situationist terms: a map of Texas marked up with red spiraling lines sketches out the anticipated flight pattern of the banana as an aimless journey, an aeronautical drift that is reminiscent of détourned maps of Guy Debord’s Paris in the 1960s.

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 145 Although the language of psychogeography was developed in response to the homogenizing forces of modern urbanism, the Situationist engagement with territory and mapping is readily transferred to the spatial politics of a significantly larger scale. The promotional website for the Banana over Texas functions as a détournement of the colonizing aims of American space exploration and an inversion of the geopolitical relations between the United States and Central America. While The Banana over Texas ridicules the high seriousness of the imperatives of sacred institutions such as NASA, it also brings into relief the geographic schizophrenia that is fundamental to American identity from manifest destiny to the War on Terror. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville surmised that democracy is inherently founded upon the virtues of American territory. Tocqueville’s description of a “boundless continent . . . with rivers which rise from neverfailing sources” is also, quite notably one “without neighbours.”32 If Eden provided source material for Tocqueville’s description of American territory as the earthly location of eternal spring, Jean Baudrillard returned a century and a half later to select the desert as his founding metaphor for American territory. Baudrillard, too, is taken by the seeming endlessness of American territory, but by the end of the 20th century the verdant pastures of Tocqueville’s account have become arid and hostile, by-products of “inhuman intelligence . . . a giant hologram”.33 This treacherous territory of hyperreality had been anticipated in the Situationists’ engagement with urban space, but their attempts to overcome the alienating arrangements of traffic and spectacle were thwarted by the local scale of their spatial investigations and emerging technologies that expanded the terrain of capital exponentially.

Border Topologies The opposition between the so-called open or free-flowing borders promoted after 1989 and the closed, impermeable borders that were codified over a decade later by the policies instituted by the Department of Homeland Security can be reviewed as two integral stages that configure and define an official sphere of circulation at work in North America. Security and trade paradigms would seem to be at odds with each other as trade advocates fewer restrictions on circulation while security works to increase restrictions. But, as I noted earlier, this is a convenient and false opposition as North American borders have worked to selectively manage traffic. The idea of the transnational put forward by neoliberal policy in the 1980s and established through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was a significant step in the partitioning and control over space in North America. These varying policy concepts of the border trade on appeals to national cohesion on the one hand (in the Department of Homeland Security 2002), or the economic necessity of transnational enterprise on the other (through

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NAFTA); however, these concepts conceal the idea that borders in the post1989 context have become useful tools in the management of inexpensive labor. While export-processing zones predate the fall of the Berlin Wall, they have proliferated and grown, as free market principles have become doctrine. At the same, time more border walls and fences have been built around the world since 1989 than at any point in human history.34 To accommodate these multiple functions demanded by security and trade, borders have become “devices,” to borrow a term from the Italian architect Stefano Boeri and the Multiplicity collective. Border Devices (2003) is a project that classifies and arranges the different types of borders emerging worldwide as six different types: pipes, enclosures, funnels, folds, sponges, and phantom limbs. These categories are based upon the mechanisms used to control and channel flows across borders. Multiplicity’s project is a kind of natural history of borders, studying their evolution as the “other side” of globalization, spatial management strategies to control the increase in human traffic that is an integral part of global processes.35 The project seems to suggest that the proliferation of borders is an essential part of the global equation rather than its “other side.” In positioning borders as “devices,” however, the opposition between global flows and borders seems to come undone. Border Devices suggests that while borders still perform their role as geographic lines between nation states, they also work as technologies that enable new spatial arrangements, channels or networks that move well beyond the idea of the nation state. Didier Bigo more forcefully questions the idea of the border as a physical limit between interior and exterior when he employs the metaphor of the Möbius strip to emphasize that what appears as two surfaces is in fact one.36 Bigo’s metaphor is one that accounts for the variable functions of contemporary borders in a global context. These new border topologies contrast starkly with the spatial imagery conjured up by the media when American politicians repeatedly refer to the border as “porous” or “leaky”: violence from Mexico is said to “spill over” into the US, while the Canadian border has been called “dangerously porous.”37 These references often serve as justification for increased spending on border security; “leaky” and “porous” borders ask us to imagine American territory as a bucket or a ship, a container or a vessel. Container-like metaphors offer protection to an anxious population in anxious times: these comments about the border’s porosity suggest that the fluid dynamics of globalization have become too turbulent. In this context, the United States of America is variously described as a nation that is coming apart at the seams or afloat in a sea of terror: the border becomes the messy and threatening edge and the focal point for directing anxiety. While the predominant images of the new security barrier between Mexico and the US are often framed to demonstrate their social and environmental destruction, they can also be seen to convey a monolithic, powerful and unifying picture of national strength and resilience in the face of change.

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 147 What these various metaphors seem to turn around is the degree to which the border is framed as a spatial container for the nation state, or alternatively as an abstract technological function, a “device.” Thus, the leaky and porous border that requires more and more fortification (rather than immigration reform or a change in foreign policy) works to disavow the spatial arrangements created through technological networks, global finance and increased circulation. This is a specific distribution of the sensible that calls into being a “community of insecurity” that may not otherwise cohere. While complex technologies (drones, electronic passports and eye scanners) may be used in the service of securing the border, the border is still understood as a definitive line that has some inherent protective value in and of itself. Technologies such as the “Blue Rose” radar system, proposed for implementation along the Canada–US border in 2013, follows the line itself as a virtual fence, retracing its path across land and water.38 This view of the border lends the territorial line itself a kind of totemic presence that is not in keeping with a view toward borders as technologies within globalization. In contrast, Multiplicity and Didier Bigo suggest that contemporary borders, as devices or complex spatial configurations, serve radically different ends than they did when they were established in the 19th century.39

Blockade Twenty years after NAFTA and more than a decade after new security policies were set in place after the events of 9/11, North American borders continue as sites of ongoing crisis. The opposition between trade and security, if there ever really was one, appears to have been reconciled. Although they are often seen to be at odds with each other, they work to construct the border as a specific “distribution of the sensible,” a powerful topography that screens out the more mundane activities that keep borders in business. It is no surprise then that some of the first sites targeted during the day of action staged by the Idle No More movement in January 2013 were those along the Canada–US border. Rail lines and border crossings became sites of protest across Canada; some of the larger gatherings were near the international bridges in Ontario where most of the transnational trade enters the US in a constant stream of transport trucks. Organizers referred to their actions as a form of economic slowdown rather than a blockade as such, but, either way, the action drew attention to the mounting tensions between First Nations communities and the Conservative government’s systematic dismantling of constitutional protections of indigenous sovereignty and the environment. The omnibus budget bill C-45, passed in 2012, contained sweeping changes to the 1879 Indian Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. This aggressive move by the Conservative government was designed to facilitate the expansion and growth of loosely regulated oil and mining industries in Canada.40

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In Canada, the Idle No More movement has reinvigorated debate on indigenous sovereignty and the expropriation of land for national and transnational interests. It has also opened up another chapter of reckoning with the fragile fiction of nationhood in Canada, a perennial topic of debate that Marshall McLuhan noted in 1977 in his essay, “Canada: The Borderline Case.”41 Since 9/11 Canadians have witnessed a curious resurgence of patriotism, a blend of corporate and statesponsored national identities available at Tim Hortons and Roots, and televised on Canada Day celebrations on Parliament Hill as discussed in Chapter 4. While these institutions have always existed, they have intensified in recent years mimicking the wave of patriotism that has swept the United States in the last decade. But the avid promotion of Canada as a brand identity has flourished as these companies made their operations global, thus calling attention to the transnationalism that has always haunted the making and marketing of Canadian identity. Although the movement has been criticized for its lack of focus, Idle no More pointedly calls attention to the transnational interests within the nation; it connects the pollution of waterways that traverse the continent with the willful oversight of basic rights to clean air and water that have been especially pronounced in First Nations communities; the movement has helped to break through the screen of secrecy surrounding the Alberta Tar Sands and its lack of environmental accountability.42 It has also helped to connect the dots between disparate environmental disasters that are currently taking place across the continent. These range from unmonitored stockpiles of petroleum coke by-products from the Alberta Tar Sands that accumulate yearly on docks in Detroit (awaiting shipment to China) to the explosion of a freight train carrying crude oil in Lac Megantic, Quebec that killed over 47 people.43 The Idle No More movement targeted the spheres of circulation that have long defined the neoliberal vision of the continent, the circulatory systems of pipelines and highways, by invoking First Nations constitutional rights over waterways (see Figure 5.3). The carefully staged demonstrations have illustrated that there is indeed something to see within the sphere of circulation that passes through the border, against the police invocation that there is “nothing to see,” to move on. In drawing attention to the intricate forms of transnationalism within nationalism Idle No More, shows up the selective use of borders as devices within neoliberal partitioning of North America. The Haudenosaunee art historian and curator, Jolene Rickard, points to the conflicts presented for indigenous peoples in the Americas between the colonial nation state and the global, transnational spaces that defy national boundaries. She suggests that transnationalism does not supersede the space of the nation, and rather describes this relationship as one of mutual convenience. For Rickard, “transnationalism still hangs on to nation state formations”:

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Figure 5.3 Idle No More, border shutdown, Bluewater Bridge, Sarnia Ontario, January 17, 2013 (photo: Dave Chidley)

It cannot accurately locate Indigenous space within the transnational, while simultaneously ignoring Indigenous self-determination and ultimately inherent rights. Specifically, North America remains a problematic space because it has yet to acknowledge the habitual movement of Indigenous peoples across the U.S., Canadian and Mexican borders or Indigenous homelands.44 Idle No More calls attention to the critical and unresolved tensions in North America between transnationalism and indigenous territory. It has activated the crisis of the border in new ways by multiplying the paradoxes embedded in these lines of demarcation, those that emerge between the border’s sights and sites. To return to Rancière, “the essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one.”45 Dissensus is the modality that unseats the authority of the border, thereby pulling it apart from the body politic of the nation, allowing the possibility to see it merely as the free-floating signifier that it has always been without the biometric accoutrements of 21st-century border security.

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Notes 1 Rancière, Chronicles, 110. 2 Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders,” 8. 3 Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review, 85 (2003): 82–93, 85. 4 Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 89. 5 Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 37 6 Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, 11. 7 Fernando Romero, Hyperborder: The Contemporary US–Mexico Border and its Future, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 8 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 178. 9 Tom Barry, Border Wars (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 4. 10 John Holman, “Impunity and Violence in Sierra Tarahumara,” Al Jazeera, October 1, 2011. Accessed August 21, 2013 at: www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ features/2011/10/20111011392485585.html 11 Jason De León, “Undocumented Migration, Use Wear, and the Materiality of Habitual Suffering in the Sonoran Desert,” Journal of Material Culture, 18: 4 (2013). DOI: 10.1177/1359183513496489 12 De León, Undocumented Migration Project website. Accessed January 12, 2016 at: http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com 13 De León, Material Culture, 20. 14 States of Exception ran from January 13–March 12, 2013 at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. Curated by Amanda Krugliak, the exhibition included photographs by Richard Barnes and materials from Jason De León’s fieldwork along the US–Mexico border. 15 The Border Industrialization Program that emerged in the 1960s from the ProNaF (Programa Nacional Fronterizo) period of border development. While ProNaF aimed to bring culture and tourism to the border region, the Border Industrialization Program aimed to place industry at the center of borderlands development. Arreola and Curtis, Mexican Border Cities. 16 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 23. 17 Rancière, Disagreement, 29. 18 Samuel Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), Kindle ed., location 1196 of 3709. 19 Rancière, Dissensus, 37. 20 Ian Alan Paul, Border Haunt webpage. Accessed January 12, 2016 at: www.ianalanpaul.com/borderhaunt-2011 21 BlueServo’s site was down intermittently during the summer of 2013. It currently seems to be operational. However, the tenor of the comments about its closure still remains pertinent: www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/22/tech nology-helps-border-c_n_931639.html; www.topix.com/forum/austin/TLH36 ESNHDARDOSUN (both accessed August 13, 2013). 22 Will Straw, “The Circulatory Turn,” in Barbara Crow et al. (Eds.), The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 18.

Logistics Inverted: After NAFTA 151 23 Lawrence Bird, “Global Positioning: An Interview with Ricardo Dominguez,” Furtherfield, October 15, 2011. Accessed January 12, 2016 at: www.further field.org/features/global-positioning-interview-ricardo-dominguez 24 Amy Sara Carroll attributes the Global Poetic System to Laura Borràs Castanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez in Bird, “Global Positioning.” 25 Dominguez, cited in Bird, “Global Positioning.” 26 Jacques Rancière, Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “The Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum, March 2007. Accessed August 15, 2013 at: www.egs.edu/faculty/ jacques-Rancière/articles/art-of-the-possible 27 Rancière, Dissensus, 38. 28 Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor and Seth McCormick (Eds.), Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 31–50, 49. 29 The full inscription at the top of the mural translates as follows: “Che continues to live on in the work and the anti-imperialist, democratic, and revolutionary thinking of the heroes of our America. Homeland or death. Here begins the Latin American rebellion.” 30 Marisol Rodriguez and Hector Rodriguez, “ProNaF, Cuidad Juárez: Planning and Urban Transformation,” ITU A/Z, 8: 1 (2011): 196–207. 31 Virginia Scott Jenkins, Bananas: An American History (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2000). 32 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,1863. Accessed September 27, 2013 at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/toc_indx.html 33 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 29. 34 Brown, Walled States, 24. 35 Stefano Boeri/Multiplicity (2003). Accessed January 12, 2016 at: www. attitudes.ch/expos/multiplicity/road%20map_gb.htm 36 Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in David Lyon (Ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (Uffculme: Willan, 2006), 46. 37 Sheldon Alberts, “Another US Politician Says 9/11 Terrorists Came from Canada,” National Post, October 18, 2010. Accessed January 12, 2016 at: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/10/18/another-u-s-politician-says-911terrorists-came-from-canada 38 Kathleen Harris, “US Eyes High-Tech Security Boost at Canadian Border,” CBC News Online. Accessed July 12, 2013 at: www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/ 2013/07/11/pol-border-security-hearing.html 39 Anssi Paasi, “A Border Theory: An Unattainable Dream or a Realistic Aim for Border Scholars?” in Doris Wastl-Walter (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 11–31, 22. 40 CBC News, January 16, 2013. Accessed January 12, 2016 at: www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/story/2013/01/16/idle-no-more-lookahead.html 41 McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,” 181. 42 It is notable that the most trenchant criticism of the Alberta Tar Sands project has been published outside Canada and has been suppressed within Canada. In 2010 the Harper government destroyed a report from an 18-month investigation into toxicity from Tar Sands operations and removed use naphthenic acid (a by-product of Tar Sands operations) from a list of substances monitored

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by Environment Canada. Accessed January 12, 2014 at: http://350orbust.com/ 2010/07/07/canadian-politicians-quietly-cancel-18-month-investigation-intotar-sands-pollution-tear-up-draft-report-2 43 “Company Appeals Pet-Coke Storage Ban on Detroit River,” CBC News Online. Accessed February 15, 2014 at: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/ company-appeals-pet-coke-storage-ban-on-detroit-river-1.2521340; Lac Megantic explosion, The Star, November 9, 2013. Accessed January 12, 2014 at: www. thestar.com/news/canada/2013/09/11/tsb_to_update_lacmegantic_probe_amid_ alarm_over_crude.html 44 Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 110: 2 (2011): 465–486, 472. DOI: 10.1215/ 00382876-1162543 45 Rancière, Dissensus, 37.

6

Sites of Dissensus Aesthetics after the Border

The border goes by many names. With a capital B it stands for the most troublesome part of American geography. In Mexico, it is often referred to simply as la línea, a line deflated of its political weight or implication. The international boundary between the United States and Mexico has also been re-imagined through more academic monikers: the “hyperborder” of Mexican architect Fernando Romero, or “the political equator” framed as a global human rights issue that motivates Teddy Cruz’s projects between San Ysidro and Tijuana. But la frontera seems to be the only adequate term that describes this specific part of the world through prying apart and holding open the dimensionlessness of the borderline and the binary logic that underwrites it. La frontera translates as frontier, to be sure, but frontiers, for all their colonial baggage, at least indicate a state of uncertainty and lack of resolution. La frontera recalls the outer limits of Spanish colonization in what is now called the American southwest, but it also brings depth to the complex realities of the borderlands which have been erased by the blunt instruments of border control and militarization. The concept emphasizes cultural, spatial and temporal complexity against the stark contrasts produced by the line itself: a landscape torn up by demarcation and fortification and further subdivided in the atomized spaces of geoengineered agriculture and post-industrial logistics. Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza described the space and the consciousness of the borderlands as neither limit nor end, but as a critical and at times cosmic ideal of being that is “beyond binary.” Anzaldúa’s insistence on the ambivalence, ambiguity, contradiction and complexity of the borderlands seems important to recall as these qualities have become suspect in the expanding security culture of the last decade. Her work reframed mestizaje as a critical, decolonial concept that has moved from periphery to center, not just in American cultural studies but increasingly around the world as the implications of bordering and security in the 21st century multiply. Alicia Gaspar de Alba implied as much when she wrote, upon Anzaldúa’s death, that “the frontier had been transformed” by her writing. She wrote retrospectively of Anzaldúa’s cultural imprint in the 1990s when

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“everything was coming up borders” from Taco Bell commercials to “border art” and “border epistemology.”1 No longer the purview of standard American narratives of Western conquest, la frontera, in Anzaldúa’s terms, posed an intervention into boundary making: a chance to rethink the terms of territory, coloniality, gender, race, embodiment, language and place along with other categorical lines of subjectivity and culture. As Anzaldúa’s borderlands/la frontera moved from periphery to center in academic discourse, migrating away from the geography of the borderlands and her embodied experience, one wonders what was gained and lost especially as the binary logic that informs the divide between Mexico and the United States has since become more firmly entrenched. As a metaphor, the border’s move to the center had other consequences, from its trivialization through commercialization, to the litany of “posts” that have come to fore in the years following Anzaldúa’s death, from “postqueer” and “post-feminist” to “post-border.” Marcos Ramírez ERRE, an artist working in the San Diego–Tijuana border region, remarked that fatigue had set in around border discourse in the US or at least in Southern California where he’d been ghettoized as a “border artist” as if the politics of border were no longer relevant to artists working in this region. Heriberto Yépez writes of the caricatured, fictional quality of the border in his essay “Tijuanologies” implying an uneasy relationship to borderlands discourse: “to live here is to be a character, because on the border, there are no inhabitants, just archetypes.”2 Whereas culture seemed to be running to the border in the 1990s, there is now an inclination to approach the border slowly or in a circumspect manner. This is undoubtedly a by-product of American military policy and its twin wars against vaguely defined threats: policies developed in response to the “War on Terror,” now running into its second decade, and the “War on Drugs,” now in its fourth, have combined to hit Mexico and its borders in unprecedented ways, as I have elaborated in Chapter 4. A war on immigration from the global South, while not pitched in the same declarative manner, floats in between these two officially named entities and is justified by cloudy logic and the conceptual slippage between the terms drugs, terror and immigration that is perpetuated by mainstream media. While the designation “post-” could imply another phase or a moment of reckoning in the various struggles that respond to the social crises of bordering, more often than not “post-” has come to signal fatigue, resignation or worse: denial that there is even an issue at stake. The term “post-border art” has been used in a general sense to imply an ongoing preoccupation with the US–Mexico border in the context of a global art world that requires perpetual re-invention.3 Sometimes the term implies a more complex understanding of the idea of site-specificity that contests the fixed nature of the borderline.4 But the question remains as to how we might interpret the temporal schism implied in the idea of a post-border art: is it art that speaks to utopian propositions where the border is

Sites of Dissensus 155 dismantled and opened up at some point in the future? Is it work that responds to the intensification of security and violence at the border since 2001 and the biopolitical practices that have multiplied the sites of security that extend far beyond the border itself? Or is it a new phase of border art thus signaling a break from the Chicano/a art and visual culture that defined the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s? And, if so, what are points of continuity and discontinuity? I suspect that post-border art, if there is anything that willingly goes by that name, is as divergent as these questions; that post-border art is more an impressionistic characterization of practices that continue to challenge and contest the ongoing drama of the border that plays out at the center of national consciousness in both the US and Mexico in divergent ways. The celebration of borderlands culture in the late 20th century was premised on the articulation of being in-between, modes of resistance, and the recognition of longstanding cultures that answered neither to American nor Mexican origins: ideas that are nicely summed up in the mantra “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Chicano/a or Tejano/a, the emphasis is on knowledge and history that has grown from a region traversed by a legacy of Spanish and American colonial violence which has left much of the region systematically impoverished. Walter Mignolo further theorizes “border thinking” or “border gnosis” from the Chicano/a experience as “new loci of enunciation” that exposed the “epistemological limits of Western reason.”5 Though Mignolo first wrote of border thinking/ gnosis at the height of borderlands discourse (noting the overuse of the word border), his work reorients the terms of the border as a site of recognition where “the colonial difference becomes visible.” Border thinking/gnosis stems from the fissures in the modern, colonial system facilitating decolonization as an epistemological project that could not emerge from the centers of Western thought. Postmodernism and postcolonialism, for Mignolo, can only express a “Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism” and as such these particular forms of “post-” are incapable of exposing the “epistemological fractures” that border thinking enables.6 However, since Anzaldúa and Mignolo introduced border writing and thinking in the 1990s, the US–Mexico border has been cast deeper into crisis and occupied by militarization. Where borderlands culture and art emerged from border gnosis, from people who have lived for generations with the contradictions of the border, more recently the violence of transnational market economies and clandestine migration has spiked in the interrelationship between neoliberal capitalism and drug cartel violence. American policies have liberalized gun sales and pushed the drug trade underground, and as the geography of this trade reconfigured in the 1990s, Mexico became the preferred overland route to US markets. This has made for a situation where narco-culture has come to dominate life in many parts of the country and the relationship between licit and illicit flows throughout North America have become more complex.

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The Mexican journalist Carlos Monsivias writes that the “emergence of narco is the most serious episode of neo-liberal criminality.” This situation did not emerge in isolation or exclusively from the global South. Writing on the surge of narco-violence in Tijuana, Josh Kun calls upon all of us to bear responsibility for this crisis which is as much about Washington’s disavowal of two glowering statistics—that the US has 5 percent of the world’s population, yet consumes 50 percent of the world’s drugs, and that 90 percent of the guns used in drug violence in Mexico come directly from the US—as it is about internal corruption at all levels of Mexican politics.7 After the compounded political failures of the last decade the emphasis of creative practices originating in and around the border has shifted away from borderlands experience and subjectivity, to projects that make visible the stratification or atomization of spaces in and around the border and the microclimates of militarization and violence that protect capital and its channels of consumption while ensuring a steady supply of cheap and expendable labor. As immigration reform becomes increasingly elusive in the US (as well as in Canada and Europe), questions proliferate around the meaning of migration and citizenship, becoming a central concern of contemporary art in a global context. But there are no coherent positions and there is more noise than consensus. Nevertheless, recent debates around democracy and citizenship generally orbit around two interrelated issues: the first is that the rights of citizenship and democracy are not fully extended to all who “legally” reside within established democracies, hence the designation of “politics as police” that was explored in the first half of the book; and secondly, that the positioning of human migration within a legal spectrum has resulted in a global culture of relatively petty “crime” that is monitored more heavily than corporate culture, which also operates outside the state with the power to create its own extraterritorial laws. Against this backdrop, citizenship has been opened up as a hypothetical question rather than a concept that is held strongly in place by a sense of moral obligation to a nation state. In this climate, the binaries of border politics have occluded the possibilities of border thinking. Though however militarized and securitized the border has become, it still functions as the locus of contestation of state practices of exclusion and inclusion as well as a site of experimentation for alternative modes of exchange, community and citizenship. Where the emphasis of borderlands discourse tended to be performative and literary in the 1990s, relational art and architecture, social practices, tactical and locative media approaches have all worked to make visible the complex and interrelated problems that manifest at the border, even though they may originate elsewhere. At the same time, the longstanding relationship between aesthetics and politics as mutually exclusive domains has been challenged from a number of perspectives, not merely as an antiaesthetic that challenged the dominance of modernist abstraction, but

Sites of Dissensus 157 through questioning the limits of the domain of each sphere and the degree to which they are understood as separate modes of thinking and sensing. The relationship between the political and the aesthetic has been reoriented through new configurations described in terms like “migratory aesthetics,” “relational aesthetics” or “decolonial aesthetics” discussed below, or through mediatic configurations such as “tactical media” and “electronic disturbance”, as I have discussed in Chapter 5. Although there are critical differences between these aesthetic modes of inquiry, it seems that they share an interest in what Rancière describes as “dissensus,” which disrupts and reorients the distribution of the sensible, or how things come to be seen and heard. When these approaches to aesthetics are situated within the context of the border, they work as “dissensus” to unseat its presumed legitimacy as a physical or protective limit. The terms “border art” or “post-border art” thus fail to describe the interaction between the political and the aesthetic that can be activated through unexpected reconfigurations or recombinations of voice, matter or image; or in a kind of reverse engineering of the border as a system where overlooked or unseen forces become visible. Dissensus shifts, dislocates or relocates, however momentarily, the established relationship between sites, bodies and things as they are ordered by the border. Thus, the relationship between the categories migrant and citizen, between laborer and artist, between viewer and viewed, privileged and underprivileged can be cast into doubt, temporarily held in suspension, or reversed in the process. While this does not negate the violence taking place in and around the border, it can point to relationships, exchanges and interactions that are otherwise unseen or unrecognizable in the framework set in place by the conflict narratives and the discourse of terror in mainstream news media.

Performance and Pilgrimage: Border Cultures Then and Now If the reconsideration of aesthetics has been articulated along different lines in recent years, mapping channels of migration, circulation, movement and networks rather than site-specific explorations of place or performative modes of inquiry (as critical hallmarks of art in the 1990s) the difference can only be described in terms of degree rather than kind. Here, I would like to take another detour to the borderlands of the 1990s, this time to Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the Border Art Workshop to consider how we might profitably connect local knowledge, Mignolo’s “border gnosis,” with a globalized sense of the US–Mexico border that has been recast doubly in terms of the itinerant practices of the international art world and through the lens of global media where the US–Mexico border has become renowned as a primary site of humanitarian crisis and ecological disaster. Gómez-Peña’s description of the events of the Border Art

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Workshop in their formative years and the way in which their work was spatialized on the borderline seems noteworthy given that this same stretch of land has now become fully militarized in the last decade and is no longer accessible physically as a space of exchange. Gómez-Peña described the role of the line as an access point: we organize performance events right on the borderline, where the US meets Mexico in the Pacific, literally performing for audiences in both countries. When the border patrol gets too close, we cross to the Mexican side. During certain performances, we invite our audiences to cross “illegally” to the other side. We exchange food and art “illegally,” caress and kiss “illegally” across the border fence, and confront the border patrol in character. We are protected by the presence of journalist friends and video cameras. The political implications of the site and the symbolic weight of these actions garner immediate attention from international media. These are the origins of the border arts movement.8 Though Gómez-Peña stresses the “illegal” character of their performances in the 1980s, the securitization of space in the San Ysidro–Tijuana borderlands has now foreclosed any kind of casual contact. In the 1990s the border fence was comparatively flimsy, a piece of military garbage that alluded symbolically to the border rather than the dense security complex that has emerged in its place. Since 2006, the option of occupying the space of the line is no longer available in the same way. The space of the borderline is now a militarized zone where access is limited to all but the Border Patrol whose security performance on ATVs, drones and helicopters has turned the recreational spaces of Imperial Beach, Playas de Tijuana and the ecologically protected Tijuana Estuary into highly charged displays of surveillance and power. But Gómez-Peña’s work was auspicious in so far as it traced an emergent transnational imaginary of neoliberal capital that was slowly reshaping the territory of the borderlands long before the arrival of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. In 1987, several years prior to the instantiation of NAFTA, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks staged the performance Niagara–Tijuana on the US–Canada border, near the site of Niagara Falls, one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations. While Hicks and Gómez-Peña are best known for their involvement with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo in San Diego–Tijuana, their foray to the northern border is notable in so far as it drew together two disparate urban border geographies into the same conceptual space while prefiguring questions on transnational identity that still remain at the forefront of debates on immigration. Niagara–Tijuana was set within a mobile kiosk, a temple of tourist kitsch that Hicks and GómezPeña had collected from two distant border towns, the liminal space of

Sites of Dissensus 159 the cross-border Niagara Region becoming the stage for fifteen “performance actions” that ranged from “services for spiritual consultation with authentic border shamans and witches” to “begging for money while dressed in costume.”9 As border towns, Niagara Falls and Tijuana have historically been sites for romance on the run, gambling and other handy forms of temporary escape for Americans, from underage drinking to illicit sex and unsanctioned marriage. Business establishments catering to the cross-border quickie peaked somewhere near the end of the 20th century not long after the North American Free Trade Act was signed into agreement in 1994.10 Thus by 2001, the decline in cross-border leisure had already started as NAFTA positioned “trade” in terms of a landscape of manufactured goods, export-processing zones and transnational highway systems. More critically it reconfigured the border as an exclusionary space where the pedestrian, the tourist, the artist or the day-laborer is excised from the terrain and redefined in terms of legality or illegality, citizen or alien. In other words this is a long, slow fracturing of urban space along both American land borders that excludes the possibility of public space, casual meetings or encounters. Gómez-Peña and Hicks’s early “performancepilgrimages” extended the spatial logic of the border northward and envisioned the performance of liminality as mobile and transferrable. Gómez-Peña’s work has been criticized for its contradictions, however, promoting hybridity while relying, in many instances, on the binaries that are produced by the line as a symbol of the nation state to sustain his performances.11 The border, as articulated through the work of the Border Arts Workshop, functioned as a double negative, like the slash between the terms “neither/nor.” This position was leveraged by the borderline against the powerful identifications of the nation state. Gómez-Peña writes: “My America is a continent (not a country) which is not described by the outlines on any of the standard maps.”12 Owing to the contingent qualities of North America, as a tenuous collection of three colonial nations traversed by indigenous cultures that span the Americas longitudinally, the border becomes the line that recalls the ambivalent formation of three nation states. That the line must be defended or “held” suggests its precariousness. Victoria Ruétalo suggests that Gómez-Peña’s border “is more global, more flexible and geographically dislocated; it belongs to a continental map of communities in motion and cultures in context but it will never cease to exist.”13 In this context, the first border action by the Border Art Workshop/ Taller de Arte Fronterizo between the Playas de Tijuana and Imperial Beach in 1985 seems particularly noteworthy. Here, in a Daliesque scenario of role reversal, a woman in Border Patrol drag stood vigilantly facing American territory looking, with oversized binoculars, back toward home territory from the Mexican side. The cartoonish exaggeration of a protosurveillance culture was heightened by the distended binoculars, which

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were worn hip-height as a surveillance apparatus that appeared more like a beach party flotation device than something that might be used in military reconnaissance. The performers stood on the Playas de Tijuana facing the Californian Border State Park in a directional reversal of the surveillant gaze embedded in the militarized spaces of the San Diego region. While much has changed spatially in this region since 1985, where the line has expanded into a militarized zone, the logic of the border and its cast of characters from the Border Patrol to the Coyote is similar. Since 1985, the border policies put in place over successive American and Mexican administrations has merely exaggerated the dynamics of cat-andmouse games as well as the logistics of clandestine migration as addressed in Chapter 5. The comedy of the Border Patrol played out by the Border Arts Workshop in 1985 has taken on much more epic proportions lately in the reconstruction of the multi-part “Mexico–United States Border Barrier” as it had been conceived by the Department of Homeland Security in 2006. Ironically, the emphasis on border fortification is still essentially a performative gesture, however costly. Wendy Brown writes of the proliferation of border walls around the world since 2001 in terms of their performative qualities, noting that walls have done little to stop the flow of migrants or serve as a detriment to terrorist activity. Despite their great expense, she argues that their function is more theatrical than military. Recent thinking on borders more generally has looked beyond the walls themselves to the mediatic and linguistic aspects of their construction, suggesting that borders are processes that must continually be enacted to maintain their effects.14 Where ideas around performativity were first explored in literature and performance art, the performance of the border itself has become far more widespread, arguably motivating both official and state forms of border patrol along with the vernacular forms of frontier policing discussed throughout this book from the Frontiersmen in the US to the Canadian Rangers in the Arctic. The Minuteman Project, a popular American movement that has been growing since its founding in 2004, is perhaps the strongest signal of the invigorated pathology of border insecurity (discussed in chapter 2). Their events, while straightforward and predictable in nature, function performatively as a form of legal “occupation,” borrowing from the language of leftist strategy to “take back” the border in mediated vigilante events. A group of armed volunteer civilians, the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, claims to deter undocumented migrants from entering the US through patrolling isolated migrant routes with cell phones and binoculars. A strong libertarian streak runs through the organization: much of their activity is motivated by a deep mistrust of government and white pioneer fantasies of self-reliance and self-defense. In conjunction with conservative news networks, a popular narrative has arisen, which suggests that undocumented immigration to the United States is a kind of surreptitious

Sites of Dissensus 161 invasion of the homeland, a deceptive ploy to steal jobs and tax rebate checks and undermine American values. Stationed on lawn chairs, in RVs, or SUVs these hawkish army veterans and retired law enforcement officers make a sport out of monitoring the border, and much of their activity is comparable to the kind of role-playing ethos that permeates Civil War and Vietnam re-enactment troupes. The theatrical quality of the Minutemen’s promotional website is matched by the staging grounds for their first national meeting, held in Tombstone, Arizona in 2005. Once a mining town, Tombstone is now a tourist destination for the seasonal RV set, where daily re-enactments of the shoot-outs at the OK Corral have become a popular draw. While most active in Texas, Arizona and California, a Michigan chapter of the Minutemen Defense Corps opened in 2005. Chapters have also organized in other states that share a border with Canada: Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Idaho and Washington State. The foolish pride and peculiar brand of patriotism enacted through the Minuteman Project was taken up by Marcos Ramirez ERRE in The Prejudice Project, a full-sized billboard that greeted commuters on Interstate 5, the main thoroughfare between San Diego and the San Ysidro border checkpoint in 2006.15 Ramirez invited the cultural historian, Mike Davis, to pose as an anonymous (yet archetypal) redneck for the billboard image: he was photographed from behind with close-cropped grey hair and sunburned neck looking south toward the Mexican border. Davis’s red neck, framed by the collar of a camouflage T-shirt, served to visually identify the persona of the Minutemen without resorting to language as such. However, it was the strategically ambiguous message that ran across the top of the billboard that allowed for the relative success of the project: “Don’t be a man for just a minute. Be a man your whole life” could be interpreted as a straightforward endorsement of the Minutemen, a call to arms for disgruntled white folk. More subversively, the statement cuts into the value system that lies at the heart of their project and its brand of American machismo, which is premised on longstanding traditions of racial violence as carried through vigilante groups that were established with the concept of the American frontier.16 To add to the ambiguity, Ramirez’s Prejudice Project was camouflaged by another billboard running in close proximity that featured a recruitment ad for the US Border Patrol. Perhaps to commuters speeding along the highway there was little difference between the language of recruitment at work in the security industry and an ambiguous message serving to question its aims. This combination of strategy and circumstance would prove in retrospect to be both fortunate and clever, as the Prejudice Project managed to avoid drawing media scrutiny or censorship for the three months that it stood on the side of the freeway. The Prejudice Project raises important questions about the extension of border control into mainstream American culture. In the security climate

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of recent years, American land borders have become one of the most pressing domestic issues for American politicians at multiple levels. Their fortification, through new border walls, surveillance drones or “smart border” tracking systems, is understood to be one of the primary counterterrorist measures taken by the Department of Homeland Security, yet there has been no significant link to terrorist activity in Mexico or Canada.17 The symbolic importance of border enforcement in the post-9/11 era cannot be overestimated. One of the perverse paradoxes of the new security climate is that the international divide has become the site of both known and unknown threats, and the infrastructure of the border has been beefed up in highly populated sections in order to appear effective and controlled. According to Peter Andreas, the history of operations on the Mexico–US border in the 1990s (including the ramshackle “tortilla curtain” and increased ranks of border patrols agents) served as visible security measures to quell the anxiety of powerful anti-immigration groups in the southwest. As such, they were merely “politically successful policy failure[s].” The ineffectiveness of “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego and “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso, was evident in so far as it redirected migrant flows away from urban areas to more remote regions, where human- and drug-smuggling operations became more sophisticated and complex.18 The Bush administration rejigged and expanded these programs to adapt to the new “War on Terror.” Yet, according to Andreas, if the direction of security initiatives in the past had little to no effect in deterring migrants or the drug trade, the likelihood of catching “a few bombs or terrorists is far more remote.”19 Nevertheless, the US–Mexico border persists as a national obsession, and its popularity has been consistently maintained through mainstream media networks. More importantly, there is an increasingly blurred boundary between private actors such as media networks and vigilante groups seeking to lay claim to the US border and the government institutions charged with the maintenance of territorial sovereignty. Where the Prejudice Project challenged the rhetoric of patriotism as border defense in both its institutionalized and popularized forms, the popularity of border patrol as a recurrent motif in conservative circles continues. In 2014, James O’Keefe, a young conservative filmmaker operating under the moniker “Project Veritas”, staged an illegal crossing of the border by dressing in an Osama bin Laden costume—sporting a rubber mask and fatigues—and wading across the Rio Grande in South Texas.20 The absurdity of this stunt operates on several levels and raises questions about the language of activism and performance on the border and how it has been co-opted to accommodate the paranoid fantasies of the right. Considering that Osama bin Laden has been dead since 2011, the zombie return staged in O’Keefe’s performance of border insecurity underscores the importance of maintaining the border as a site of emergency. At the same time, the spatial imagination of the military-

Sites of Dissensus 163 industrial complex that has manifested at the border is also deeply embedded into the social body of the entire nation. The view to the border inevitably depends upon location and time but its performative constitution has only increased throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries as its physical presence has grown. At the same time, the scope of performative responses to the border has been articulated through increasingly diverse forms that span media and the political spectrum itself as noted above. At the US–Mexico border, where culture has long been oriented by the play between high and low, the distinction between popular forms of street art and the relationally oriented projects that have been organized through curated exhibitions such as the inSITE series (1992–2005) or Proyecto Juárez (2006) seems to have grown as the US–Mexico border continues to act as a one of the primary signs of global conflict. This has been further complicated by the expansion of the art world through the biennial system, where the market dominance of neo-conceptual aesthetics often guides the translation of the political into larger global contexts. The codification of visual languages emerging in and around the border has thus become bifurcated between these two spheres. Rather than defending one cultural form over another where we might see divisions between street art, folk art and conceptual art as well as the attendant judgments that often accompany these divisions (those that stress qualities such as relevance or authenticity), I want to read these as further distributions of the sensible where audiences are created on the basis of the partition itself. The old “tortilla curtain”, for example, has become a primary site of inscription that faces the Mexican side of the border where visual narratives draw upon Latin American traditions of mural painting as a collective memorial that records death as a commonplace experience of northward migration. From the numerous crosses affixed to the scrap metal fence, to Taller Yonke’s expansive series of murals in Nogales, Sonora, the discarded space of the fence articulates a “community of sense” that is only legible in one direction.21 The relationality at work here is not merely an expression of folk culture but operates as a distribution of the sensible where the notion of community is formed in process through a liminal space that is opened up on the underside of the border. The intersection of the international art world and the US–Mexico border, however, has often traded on forms of spectacle to make the border seem strange again as its modes of neoliberal circulation and enforcement become increasingly entrenched. Here, dissensus has become a strategy in projects like Javier Téllez’s One Flew over the Void (Balla Perdida) (2005) or Santiago Sierra’s Submission (Formerly Word of Fire) 2006–2007 which have become emblematic forms of counter-staging that present the border from the Mexican side, framing a different message for global distribution. Téllez hired a stuntman who performed as an undocumented human cannonball projected across the border on the Playas de Tijuana, the same

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site where the Border Arts Workshop conducted their first “border action” in 1985. Although this was only part of a larger collaboratively based project including psychiatric patients from Tijuana, the image of the transborder flight played well into the global picture of the US–Mexico border as it was being primed for transition again in 2006 with the establishment of the Secure Fence Act.22 Similarly, Santiago Sierra’s Submission (Formerly Word of Fire) appeared not long after the same act came into effect in 2006–2007, although its message was targeted toward Mexico City as the seat of political power during Felipe Calderón’s presidency.23 In both instances, these works provide a powerful image of the Mexico–US border as a differential instrument that enables the circulation of specific things and people while reproducing income disparity and other forms of submission and dependence that have deepened through trade agreements like NAFTA and security programs like the Secure Fence Act. Thus, the border is framed not merely as a blockade to keep the migrating masses away, but an instrument of global capital itself. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have reframed the question of borders in globalization, which are often considered an obstacle to the free market, as central to the operations of global economies themselves: borders, far from serving merely to block or obstruct global passages of people, money or objects, have become central devices for their articulation. Borders play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space of contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism.24 While clandestine migration takes place in remote areas of the desert, the site for much of what makes news as border violence takes place in the informal cities that grew during the late 20th century. The informal status of the colonias that house many migrant workers in cities like Matamoros, Juárez, Nogales or Tijuana are a by-product of globalization. Artists and cultural critics have noted that there is nothing natural about the landscape that has been manufactured by the US–Mexico border. Néstor García Canclini first described Tijuana as the urban product of simulation: from its virtually augmented economies that established the transnational, post-industrial electronics industry to its historic status as an entertainment retreat for American tourists. Similarly, in 1999, the artist Ursula Biemann turned her attention to Juárez as “an entirely simulated place with simulated politics, a zone from which the public has been thoroughly eradicated.”25 More recently, Alex Rivera’s sci-fi scenario for his film Sleep Dealer (2008) was set in a border city of the future where all American labor needs were supplied by a semi-virtualized workforce operating everything from heavy machinery to military air force bombers stationed in factories on the northern edge of the Mexican border. The ironically named maquiladoras or “golden mills,” from which Rivera’s

Sites of Dissensus 165 future scenario is derived, were post-industrial assembly plants established along the northern fringe of Mexico in the 1960s as part of the Border Industrialization Program. Border towns like Tijuana and Juárez have since grown into large cities expanding rapidly during the rise of NAFTA in the 1990s. As products of neoliberal policy, these manufacturing complexes emerged in tandem with the long, slow modification of the Rio Grande and other watershed regions in the borderlands where water has been mined and exhausted prior to reaching Mexican territory. However, for Teddy Cruz, the Guatemalan-born, San Diego-based architect, the US–Mexico border functions as a critical site of conflict, a “political equator” between the global North and the global South. In his work, Tijuana and San Diego form the starting point of this geographical line that extends across the US–Mexico border and around the world through several zones of geopolitical conflict including the border zones of Ceuta and Melilla between Spain and Morocco and the Israeli– Palestinian border. This map provides an alternative geopolitical imaginary than that fuelled by the so-called “axis of evil” or the “non-integrating gap” through making visible the conditions of economic disparity and political corruption within globalization rather than casting off a series of rogue states unmoored from the rest of the world. But for Cruz the economic disparity between Tijuana and Southern California becomes a “critical threshold” in this geography which has provided an ongoing influence for an architectural practice that is embedded more squarely in experimental pedagogy, collaboration and relational practice than in conventions of architecture. Cruz’s projects mobilize the border, serving in his words to “radicalize the local” through “exposing conflict” as a means to transform architectural practice. Some of the earliest projects emerging from his studio such as Postcards from the Border, served to reposition the contemporary San Diego area as the world’s largest “gated community,” one that attempts to steel itself away from its neighbor to the south even though the translocal flows created within the Tijuana–San Diego region remind us that the partitions of space in and around the border are more fluid than they first appear. Through projects such as Sixty Miles of Trans-Border Conflict (2008) and the Political Equator conferences (2006–2011), the Tijuana–San Diego border region serves as a metaphor for the strained, asymmetric relationship between the US and Mexico. Regionally, Cruz’s work questions the driving forces behind what passes as urban development in North America, which he describes as puritan and exclusionary practices. These have become all too familiar in the suburban McMansion as well as the retro-fitted, pseudo-density of contemporary cities through forms of “steroid urbanism.” Working against this tide, his projects look for answers in the informal, “non-conforming” neighborhoods of Tijuana, and in the Chicano/a border communities of San Ysidro where non-profit organizations such as Casa Familiar have

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formed the backbone of a long-term collaborative social housing project. Cruz’s practice stems from a desire to accord agency to the peripheral communities in San Diego, San Ysidro and Tijuana, giving priority to local knowledge and the intelligence found in “social flows.” It is at the level of the neighborhood that Cruz locates the urban laboratory of the 21st century, redefining the idea of urban density not in terms of the number of units per acre, but rather as the number of social exchanges per acre. His projects between these two border cities aim toward an emphasis on social relations, what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have stressed as the most critical element to understanding contemporary borders. For them, it is “the quality of social relations that are constituted and reproduced by and through borders that matters.”26 This is a tall order given that this trans-border urban region is challenged by the spatial model put in place by the expanding military-industrial complex at the border between the two cities. Thus, as part of the 2011 Political Equator 3 conference, Cruz staged, with the environmental planner Oscar Romo, a remarkable series of meetings that explored the sites of the San Ysidro–Tijuana borderlands. The itinerary began on the US side at the Tijuana Estuary and moved through the small farming communities surrounding San Ysidro that were established in the early part of the 20th century. These gradually gave way to the highly patrolled border zone itself where the conference group were invited to participate in an unconventional crossing into Mexico through a drainage ditch that accommodates the excess water run-off, trash and sewage that streams downhill from Los Laureles Canyon, the last informal settlement that sits atop Mexico’s northern edge. For Cruz and Romo, the connection was between Los Laureles Canyon and the Tijuana Estuary, where the ability to protect the ecology of the estuary depends upon shoring up the Canyon, both literally and metaphorically, as part of a trans-border watershed council. Los Laureles Canyon is an informal community of nearly 85,000 people, with a nearby assembly plant at the top of a hill.27 The waste from both the community and the plant flows downhill during the rainy season and mudslides are common. Thus, the state protections of the Tijuana estuary and the border wall itself are useless in separating out the transnationally deregulated zones of pollution on the Mexican side from the highly regulated watershed on the US side. The ironies here are thick. As development agendas in San Diego produce waste housing as mid-20th-century homes are cleared for building newer, larger homes for market, the leftover stock often flows south, wholesale, where small post-war bungalows (no longer desirable in the US) become stackable units in Tijuana. Similarly, old garage doors, televisions and tires become building materials in various colonias thus repurposing and recycling San Diego’s waste. Having studied these transborder flows, both Cruz and Romo recognized the importance of working with the Los Laureles community as guardians of the Tijuana

Sites of Dissensus 167 Estuary, with the intention of establishing a corresponding research station to monitor pollution on the Mexican side. Through the organization Alter Terre, Romo has worked in Los Laureles on a long-term basis to secure canyon walls with strips of recycled tires and planting trees and shrubs to keep cyclical erosion at bay. But the project can also be regarded through what Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga call an “experimental community,” one that depends upon critical relationships and interactions between unlikely worlds, in spite of their physical proximity. According to Basualdo and Laddaga, experimental communities are “durable associations of individuals who explore anomalous forms of being together while addressing a problem in a certain locality.” These communities, however temporary, produce an “aesthetic manifestation of social knowledge that emerges in the process.”28 The atypical crossing from the US into Mexico that was staged at the Political Equator event also challenged ideas of legal and illegal flows by reversing the logic of clandestine migration through tunnels and other unofficial points of entry that circumvent the architecture of the border wall. Nearly a hundred conference participants waited in a drainage culvert to enter Mexico from the US where an impromptu checkpoint was established with Mexican border agents who performed their normal duties stamping passports for day tourists to Tijuana (Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2). But the short, underground route through the trash-lined culvert, followed by a long, uphill trek on a rocky footpath seemed to recall both the old idea of religious pilgrimage as well as the more recent and desperate migration narratives of those entering the US through unofficial channels. Although this was a highly staged situation, it was the most direct way of comprehending the bisected watershed terrain that connected the Tijuana Estuary with the Canyon as well as the futility of the border wall on this site. The culvert crossing was the beginning of a cross-border pilgrimage to Los Laureles Canyon, where the final session of the conference took place. The brief trek set the stage for a strange form of encounter between the community of Los Laureles who hosted the event, and the mixed group of academics, artists, environmentalists, and writers who had gathered in the colonia from around the world. Arriving on school buses at this point, we were as much of a curiosity to the neighborhood as the site was to many of us. Most immediately this was a close encounter between global privilege and poverty as well as between those participating in the community and those observing it for a few hours. But rather than cynically dismissing the event as a form of disaster tourism, it seems important to reconsider the conventions of spectatorship at work in visual culture, where the mechanics of the gaze have been partitioned between the observer and the observed. These conventions of looking tend to overshadow the most basic encounters at the border where it is easier to look away from the marked of disparity between extreme wealth and

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Figure 6.1 Culvert crossing, Political Equator 3, June 2011 (photo: Lee Rodney)

poverty. But in this event both communities were somewhat uncomfortably on display to each other and there was vulnerability on both sides. Again Rancière offers a way out of fixed positions of the gaze, suggesting that looking can be the first order of change. His “emancipated spectator” does not look to control or to fetishize, rather: Emancipation starts from the opposite principle, the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection. It starts when we realize that looking also is an action which confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it.29 At work in this watershed project are alternative forms of citizenship that are not solely defined by municipal or national lines although they traverse these official governance structures. The watershed council established through this project operates as a form of insurgent citizenship in the face of deregulation where the residents of informal settlements gain agency through their participation in protecting the Canyon (and the literal stability of their neighborhood) in the process protecting the Estuary

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Figure 6.2 Culvert crossing, Political Equator 3, June 2011 (photo: Lee Rodney)

on the other side. This is a situation of non-governmental co-dependency established in the face of the border’s instrumentalized economies. From the early days of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo to the inSITE exhibitions and Proyecto Juárez, the idea of public space and participation has been central to work against the stratification of cultures on the border, especially as these gaps appear to be widening since the 1990s. This insistence on the impromptu creation of public spheres, experimental communities or forms of insurgent citizenship have been the hallmark of practices emerging from the Mexico–US borderlands, where there is no official accommodation for a transborder public in the trade and security agendas that have taken priority in the last two decades. These practices have also emerged within the social and relational turns in contemporary art practice more broadly. The ongoing fascination with participation in contemporary art works to resuscitate politics within a globalized art world, one that is driven as much by neoliberal interests in creative economies as it is by a more inclusive or even democratic approach to curating international exhibitions. Criticism of the participatory turn in contemporary art, most notably by Claire Bishop, suggests the degree of fatigue and frustration with the social which is often dressed up as a series of false choices that attempt to mitigate the decline in other forms of civic engagement.30 But it seems that the concern with participation,

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however facile it appears in its various guises, adds a much needed injection of reflexivity into the contemporary art world, which, more often than not, tends to bracket itself off—architecturally, spatially and discursively—from the social. In locating social, relational and community projects on the border, its status is thrown into question and it is pried apart from its naturalizing function as the dividing line between citizen and migrant. In claiming the border as a public space, projects that take up the border as a specific site also extend ideas around “insurgent citizenship” forms that are not recognized in a national or legal framework, but those that emphasize citizenship as an act or a practice. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson write that the figure of the “illegal” is a “key actor in reshaping, redefining, contesting the borders of citizenship.” Following Étienne Balibar, they point out that such a subject often acts independently of legal status through forms of “insurgent citizenship” which thwarts a simple opposition between inclusion and exclusion.31

Looking at Juárez: Transnational Art and Capital If the Tijuana–San Diego border has been the predominant site of the global art world’s recognition of the political condition of the Mexico–US border, El Paso and Juárez have figured only intermittently in the same contexts. Although El Paso and Juárez form the largest contiguous urban area along the Mexico–US border, the level of violence in Juárez seems to have outpaced Tijuana, and the economic conditions are generally more extreme. However, the city of Juárez seems to have become a symbol for failed political relations between Mexico and the US as well as the state of internal corruption within Mexico itself. In this guise, Juárez has become known internationally for its “femicides,” the widespread killing of young migrant women working in Juárez, as well as more general narco-violence that has overtaken the city as a port of entry for the drug trade entering the US. Since 2006, the Mexican–US drug wars have claimed between 60,000 and 120,000 lives and the city of Juárez has been a central site of this conflict, where rival drug cartels vie for territory at the border.32 But Juárez has also served as a site of resistance as well: from the civil-society activism of the Juárez Resistance/Resistencia Juarense to the powerful messages sent to the global world by the artists Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra. Teresa Margolles’s work in the El Paso–Juárez borderlands formed the basis of What Else Can We Talk About?, which represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2009; this, along with Santiago Sierra’s large-scale earthwork in the Anapara industrial park near Juárez, have both become well known tests of the art world’s ability to frame global violence within its own parameters. Cuauhtémoc Medina, curator of Margolles’s work for the Mexican entry at the 53rd Venice Biennale, writes of the “density of violence” in Mexico’s current historical moment, and suggests that the visual arts have overtaken literature as the primary mode of expression within this context as more engaged and socially committed.33

Sites of Dissensus 171 Both Margolles and Sierra have focused on Juárez as a highly specific site where the geopolitics of US–Mexico relations intensify. Their work carries on where Ursula Biemann’s earlier project in Juárez, Performing the Border (1999) left off. A video essay and publication that traced the multiple forces that converge in this city, those resulting from NAFTA and the loosely regulated transnational electronics industry, Biemann’s anthropological study of gender in Juárez relied upon extensive interviews with several women working in the city’s maquiladoras and sex trade. Her project accommodated local agency and suggested plausible points of convergence between the systemic violence against women that was culminating in the femicides and the larger economic forces at work that abstracted the bodies of migrant women as flexible, cheap and potentially disposable laborers.34 However, since Biemann’s project, the scale of violence has grown substantially and is no longer directed exclusively to women as the militarization of the War on Drugs became official in 2008 when former President Felipe Calderón decided to pitch the Mexican Army against the drug cartels. In this, Margolles and Sierra have addressed the escalating culture of violence by challenging the lines between contemporary art and politics, encountering censorship in the process. Santiago Sierra’s Submission (Formerly Word of Fire) was carved into the ground in the industrial park of Anapara on the outskirts of Juárez in 2006. Written in 4.5-metre, concrete-filled trenches, the giant message was legible in Spanish as “sumision” only by aerial view.35 Its orientation faced south toward Mexico City, rather than north toward the United States as Sierra had planned to set the giant word ablaze as a protest directed toward Mexico City as the seat of power for the Calderón government and other pro-free trade oligarchs whose policies had facilitated the extreme poverty and environmental degradation in and around the site of Anapra. Sierra’s plans to set the word on fire were censored by local authorities, but the documentation of the work through film and photograph remains ambivalently positioned both as political critique and relational art. “Sierra is no human-rights activist” writes Kelly Baum, as he refuses to ameliorate the situations that his works condemn. But Sierra always implicates the viewer in relationships that are otherwise excised from the purview of the global art world, in the process “exacerbating an existing tension in the social field.”36 Submission (Formerly Word of Fire) can be read as reinforcing the US–Mexico borderline more globally as a partition of the sensible, where the privilege of the global art world as a site of consumption is reinforced by the vantage point that is framed for Mexico’s elite and anyone else with the means to view the work in its documentary forms. But the exploitation on the ground is perpetuated when one considers that the construction workers hired to construct the piece are not afforded the same view to the message, rather, they are embedded in within it. Thus, Sierra reinforces their role as mute victims of both transnational capital and the global art world condemned to play out the tragedy of Juárez.

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Teresa Margolles’s What Else Can We Talk About? (2009), while materially based in the violence of Juárez, functions quite differently from Sierra’s site-specific stamp on the borderlands. Margolles’s work is performed in the service of collecting the most abject traces of narco-culture in Juárez, what remains when bodies have been removed to the morgue for forensic investigation. Her ghostly and highly minimal works are infused with the blood and dirt from the sites that are left on the streets after the investigation takes place. As many of these murders remain unresolved, Margolles’s work distributes these sites of trauma well beyond Juárez where audiences are asked to contend with the state of corruption that takes place through the El Paso–Juárez borderlands as a choke point within a much larger network of political loopholes that exist between Mexico and the United States. Her video Irrigation (2010), however, called attention to the proximity between the violence of Juárez and the relative quiet of West Texas, where El Paso is counted among the world’s safest cities. The video documented an irrigation truck driving slowly along Highway 90 in Texas between the towns of Alpine and Marfa depositing 5000 tons of water infused with human waste from murder sites in Juárez.37 This molecular haunting of the West Texas borderlands fits seamlessly into larger economies of the US–Mexico border, an atomized landscape which has been geo-engineered to suit post-industrial assembly and logistics as well as large-scale farming operations. The intensive agriculture on much of the US side is made possible through undocumented labor and water mining. Irrigation therefore taps into the politics of water and migration that is leveraged by the US–Mexico border by this small act of returning the pollution back across the border to US territory.

Decolonial Aesthetics or Aesthetics after the Border As the legitimacy of the US–Mexico border became culturally contested throughout the latter half of the 20th century, American and transnational policies have increasingly shaped the border as a significant division between the developed and the developing world, regulation and deregulation, or between citizen and migrant. The questions that have been opened up around the status of the US–Mexico border through contemporary art practices over the last few decades have thus sought to draw attention to the violence taking place on the border or to question its status and authority. While North American borders worked as instruments of colonization in the 19th century, we are less inclined to think of them this way in the 21st century. However, some of the most strident critical openings of the border have come from a decolonial perspective. The artist collective, Postcommodity, has worked along the US–Mexico border to contest the militarization of indigenous territory with the construction of the border fence and increasing surveillance throughout the region. Their large-scale project, Repellent Fence (2015–ongoing) is a transborder line stretching two

Sites of Dissensus 173 miles from Douglas, Arizona to Agua Prieta, Sonora across the US–Mexico border through traditional Apache, Papago, and Tohono O’odham lands (Figure 6.3).The Repellent Fence is formed through a series of “scare eye” balloons that create a line that runs perpendicular to the US–Mexico boundary. These balloons are enlarged versions of commercial agricultural balloons used to repel birds from crops. Postcommodity’s series of giant balloons across the US–Mexico border aims to “suture” communities that are divided by the fence and to symbolically connect indigenous peoples of the Americas hemispherically. Their work positions indigenous struggles within the context of contemporary immigration crises by correlating migration routes with indigenous trade routes thereby calling attention to the border as a colonial instrument of control.38 As a series of dots connecting American and Mexican territory with indigenous ancestral land, the Repellent Fence asks us to sense an erasure that the US–Mexico border fence has systematically enacted in all of its guises, from a surveyed line in the 19th century to a highly militarized zone in the 21st. In traversing the border across indigenous lands, the Repellent Fence serves as a counter-predatory tactic to open out this nationalized territory to a decolonial perspective. Traversing the US–Mexico border by charting a line that traces forms of cultural continuity that long predate national borders, Repellent Fence serves as a form of decolonial aesthetics. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vàzquez have recently extended border thinking and epistemology to the field of decolonial aesthetics, which propose new sites of creativity and

Figure 6.3 Postcommodity, Repellent Fence, October 2015 and ongoing

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knowledge beyond the forms of “universal” knowledge produced by the modern/colonial system. However, if aesthetics has been linked to Western philosophy, decolonial aesthetics is only coined momentarily as a means to “delink” the senses from the modern ideals of beauty and to move the sensory toward a “transmodern” and “pluriversal” world. Mignolo and Vàzquez write of “decolonial aestheSis” as a process which begins “from the consciousness that the modern/colonial project” is not just economic, political and epistemological—it is also sensory and perceptual. Unlike modern and colonial aesthetics, “decolonial aestheSis” operates through artistic practices that work to decolonize the senses. The decolonial therefore operates in between “the monoculture of globalization and regional nationalist cultures” through emphasizing interculturality and border dwelling. In language reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s interstitial spaces and hybridity, decolonial aesthetics aims toward “promoting transnational identities-in-politics beyond the globalized market, the state, institutional religions and normalizing aesthetics.”39 This important foray into colonialism as an aesthetic program might seem to be at odds with Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics which begins with modern, Western narratives of aesthetic philosophy to open the sensory to its political potential. But rather than seeing a schism between Rancière’s reading of aesthetics and Mignolo and Vàzquez’s reading of decolonial aesthetics, it seems more productive to read the two in tandem. Rancière, like Deleuze before him, proposed important ways of thinking about the senses that stood apart from the dominant Kantian paradigm of modern aesthetics. But neither philosopher managed to provide convincing analyses of art that extended their ideas fully into the contemporary world. Claire Bishop extends Rancière’s work from his emphasis on modern, post-Enlightenment aesthetics in noting that he “reworks” the term aesthetic. While modern aesthetics has conventionally read the work of art as autonomous, Rancière suggests, in a subtle but important shift, that it is our experience of the work of art that is autonomous, rather than the art object itself. And it is the autonomy of our sensory experience that opens out to the political as “the promise of a better world.”40 In this way, Bishop writes that “it is not possible to conceive of an aesthetic judgment that is not at the same time a political judgment—a comment on the ‘distribution’ of the places and of the capacities or incapacities attached to those places.”41 In essence, this is the work of “dissensus” and it overlaps with what Mignolo and Vàzquez call “delinking” from the modern/colonial system which has fashioned territories and borders as perceptual and sensory concepts. Rancière’s reading of the relationship between politics and aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible or the gap between what is seen and heard provides an opening to mine the exclusionary paradigms of Western aesthetics. Whether dissensus or delinking, what is most critical is the ability to think and to sense beyond the border, temporally and spatially, and to see

Sites of Dissensus 175 its complexity once again as it had been envisioned more ambiguously as la frontera for people in and of the borderlands. In their collaborative work as the Tug Collective, borderlands artists Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar write of “contingent, unpredictable and open-system maps,” a form of Deleuzian cartography that is capable of “unearthing” an alterNative understanding of space and identity that stems from multiple and heterogeneous sources of knowledge and practice “without the antagonistic imperative to choose sides.”42 Against the borderline as a partition, their work recalls the lines of desire and movement that form “social trails,” a transverse axis like Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence that delinks the colonial authority put in place by the borderline. We might therefore return to the question of “post-border” art that was outlined at the beginning of the chapter as the aesthetic possibility of sensing acts of community and citizenship that are neither American nor Mexican but those that exist temporally and spatially beyond the international boundary line.

Notes 1 Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “Crop Circles in the Cornfield: Remembering Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004),” American Quarterly, 56: 3 (2004): iv–vii, vi. 2 Heriberto Yépez, “Tijuanologies,” in Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo (Eds.), Tijuana Dreaming: Art and Life at the Global Border (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 47. 3 See in particular, Jennie Klein, “Performance, Post-Border Art, and Urban Geography,” PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art, 29: 2 (2007): 31–39. Michael Dear, Post Border City: The Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California (New York: Routledge, 2003). 4 Jamie Ratliff, “Where Else Could We Talk About? The Border as Nomadic Site,” Journal of Curatorial Studies, 3: 2–3 (2014): 346–369, 348. 5 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6. 6 Mignolo, Local Histories, 37. 7 Josh Kun, “The Kidnapped City,” in Kun and Montezemolo (Eds.), Tijuana Dreaming, 355–369, 363. 8 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Multiple Journeys: A Performance Chronology,” in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Eds.), Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 315–332, 319. 9 Gómez-Peña, “Multiple Journeys,” 319. 10 Arreola and Curtis, Mexican Border Cities, 76. 11 Claire Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the US–Mexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35. 12 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice (Eds.), Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), 1. 13 Victoria Ruétalo, “Slippery Borders: Negotiating North American Hybrid Identities,” in Julián Castro-Rea (Ed.), Our North America: Social and Political Issues after NAFTA (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 171–182, 180.

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14 Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 25. 15 See http://marcosramirezerre.com/prejudice-project/ (accessed May 15, 2015). 16 Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacón, No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US–Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 38. 17 Ackleson, “Border Security in Risk Society,” 6. 18 Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders,” 4. 19 Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders,” 6. 20 See www.projectveritas.com/our-work/border-security-national-security (accessed March 9, 2015). 21 The term “communities of sense” comes from the anthology of the same name. See Hinderliter et al. (Eds.), Communities of Sense. 22 Téllez worked with psychiatric patients in Tijuana to conceive of the work as a parade, protest and carnival putting the international border into the same metaphorical space as the line between “normality and pathology.” Steven Stern, “In Focus: Javier Téllez,” Frieze, 116 (2008), 14. 23 Kelly Baum, “Santiago Sierra: How to Do Things with Words,” Art Journal, 69: 4 (2010): 7–13, 12. 24 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, ix. 25 Ursula Biemann, “Performing the Border,” in Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Ed.), Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital and Citizenship at US Borders (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 100. 26 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 279. 27 Justin McGuirk, “Tijuana: Life on the Political Equator,” Guardian, July 1, 2014. Accessed March 10, 2015 at: www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/01/ tijuana-political-equator-radical-cities-extract-justin-mcguirk 28 Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga, “Experimental Communities,” in Hinderliter et al. (Eds.), Communities of Sense, 197–214, 199. 29 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum, 45: 7 (2008): 270–277, 275. 30 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 28. 31 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, 257. 32 Zulma Mendez and Kathleen Staudt, Courage, Resistance and Women in Ciudad Juarez: Challenges to Militarization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), Kindle ed., location 108 of 4048. 33 Cuauhtémoc Medina, Art 21 interview. Accessed June 16, 2015 at: http:// blog.art21.org/2012/08/03/interview-with-critic-curator-and-art-historiancuauhtemoc-medina-part-1 34 Ursula Biemann, Been There and Back to Nowhere: Gender in Transnational Spaces (Berlin: b-books, 2000). 35 Jennifer Doyle, Santiago Sierra, Frieze Magazine, 113 (2008). Accessed March 12, 2015 at: www.frieze.com/issue/review/santiago_sierra1/ 36 Baum, “Santiago Sierra,”13. 37 Ratliff, “Where Else?” 348. 38 Postcommodity, Repellent Fence. Accessed June 23, 2015 at: http://post commodity.com/RepellentFence.html 39 Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vàzquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text, July 15, 2013. Accessed June 22,

Sites of Dissensus 177 2015 at: http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonialwoundsdecolonial-healings/#sthash.Fa7Ljwg1.dpuf 40 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 27. 41 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 29. 42 Gaelyn Aguilar and Gustavo Aguilar, “Fuzzy Frontiers: A Performative Materialization of Intentionality,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation, 8: 2 (2012). Accessed March 21, 2015 at: www. criticalimprov.com/article/view/2121

7

Have You Left the American Sector? Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle

In September 2005, a road sign went up on the Windsor waterfront directly across from downtown Detroit. In both official Canadian languages it simply stated: “YOU HAVE LEFT THE AMERICAN SECTOR/VOUS ÊTES SORTIS DU SECTEUR AMÉRICAIN” (see Figure 7.1). The sign was oriented toward the river and the imaginary line of the Canada–US border that runs down the middle. It resembled an official traffic sign in every respect, except that it was not visible from the road: facing a pedestrian walkway, the sign could only be read by cyclists, joggers and others out for a casual stroll through the riverfront park. Despite its unassuming location, its message posed a direct challenge to the longstanding Cold War narrative of the Canada–US border as the “world’s longest undefended boundary” in baldly re-enacting another Cold War motif: the Checkpoint Charlie sign which stood as a symbol for a divided post-war Berlin. The sign signaled the demarcation of Canadian territory and at the same time, historical allusions to American and Allied territory in the post-war partitioning of Germany. As a temporary project by the Vancouver-based artist Ron Terada, the sign stood only for four days after it was censored by overzealous city councilors who elected to remove it for fear of hurting local business and offending American visitors. The project was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Windsor and originally slated to stand as a four month public art project. Terada’s sign departed from the Cold War relic in a few critical ways, however. The Berlin sign was worded in the present tense “YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR” and marked the line between East and West as an ideological frontier in Russian, German, French and English. Terada’s sign, by contrast, was worded in the past tense, “YOU HAVE LEFT THE AMERICAN SECTOR” and lacked two of the four languages that constituted the political territory that Checkpoint Charlie once symbolized. Terada’s re-inscription of the Canada–US border as a sign of danger in 2005 opened up conflicting narratives and signaled that the once-cozy relationship between Canada and the US had been cooling. Terada’s sign seemed to unearth unresolved issues in Canada–US relations: although it was a bald declarative statement, the

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 179 sign simultaneously became a representational dilemma. In the aftermath of local censorship in Windsor, Terada’s statement echoed as a series of interrogative variations in a larger Canadian context: Have you left the American Sector? is it possible to do so? and what is an American Sector in an escalating climate of security and remote control? Terada’s project also drew attention to Windsor as a city of limited selfdefinition, entirely dependent on its American neighbor. Like Detroit, much of its urban core is emptied out, but Windsor’s streetscape has been taken over by a dense network of billboards and signs geared to American customers. Directions to one of two Canada–US border crossings compete with ads for plastic surgery, sex shops and nightclubs. This endless signage indicates that Windsor is a transitory affair, a quickie on the way to another place. What it lacks in terms of a distinguishing landscape or architectural intrigue, it makes up for in the visual noise along its major thoroughfares. Windsor’s motto is “The City of Roses” an allusion to its Commonwealth past, but more accurately Windsor is a city of signs, both literally and symptomatically. The city’s alignment on the international border and its historical urban plan are oriented toward Detroit as a kind of lifeline, but

Figure 7.1 Ron Terada, YOU HAVE LEFT THE AMERICAN SECTOR/VOUS ÊTES SORTIS DU SECTEUR AMÉRICAIN, 2005 (photo: Lee Rodney)

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it is one that is slowly being severed as the Canada–US border thickens, through the multiple effects of a security complex which have refashioned this border as a zone of remote control and political conflict. The politics of the Canada–US border have frequently been played out in Windsor through large-scale signs in public spaces. These range from corporate logos on riverfront buildings to billboards, and projections that attempt to intervene in the localized, borderline space established through increased surveillance and security. As the billboard has become a medium of choice for many artists, Windsor has often been a preferred location for staging dissent toward Canadian–American relations, from the beginnings of NAFTA to the more recent polarization of security policy. At the same time, Windsor’s waterfront is flanked by the corporate towers for Caesars entertainment complex and Chrysler, two American companies which form an architectural, transborder conversation with the centrally located Renaissance Center on the Detroit side where General Motors has its international headquarters. Detroit’s still impressive skyline—a collection of glass towers and art deco skyscrapers—is plainly visible from the south side of the Detroit River on the Canadian bank, which suggests that Detroit’s best view is not visible from within, but rather from the outside, across the international border. Jerry Herron refers to the conditions produced in Detroit as a “borderama,” a series of spectacles for the world where the city continually threatens to disappear, hovering in a borderline state “between city/not-city.” Herron’s metaphor is borrowed from the performances and writings of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who characterizes the media politics of the Mexico–US border as a “borderama,” a panoramic spectacle, and a ruse to incite fear.1 From the vantage point of Windsor, Detroit looks like a city; likewise, from Detroit’s waterfront, one can see the corporate signage of American enterprise. But beyond these “borderama” spectacles, the signs of urban life are not those advertised by the architectural theatre along the waterfront. The narrows of the Detroit River, where the two cities face each other, have become a politically charged space along the Canada–US border, one where corporate interests predominate. The vision of Windsor as a modern, international city—one strongly identified with Detroit—can be seen in nearly all photographs from the early part of the 20th century. Images from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s show the cities of Windsor and Detroit with vibrant architecture and equally vibrant street life, the Detroit River and the international border working to connect the two cities rather than as zone of division. The visual record of the locale suggested the optimism of the past and the possibilities of an international city that spanned the Canada–US border: pictures of ferryboats that crossed the river multiple times each day prior to World War II; film footage of the tunnel construction or in plans for the “Americanada Teleferry,” a gondola that was proposed to link Detroit’s Cobo Centre to Windsor’s waterfront in the 1960s. This is a far cry from the contemporary

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 181 moment where the two cities have become increasingly disconnected. This dwindling ease of access, coupled with the political and economic problems that emerged in Detroit and Windsor over the last fifty years, have dealt a blow to the transnational, urban identity once fostered between the two cities. Similarly, most Detroiters have taken the international border with Windsor for granted until recently, for the internal class and racial divisions that carved up the city during the 20th century proved to be more significant, ongoing political issues. Where Detroit’s borderland conditions are complex, Windsor has become a kind of offshore suburb, one that calls attention to Detroit’s situated-ness on the international boundary line. In the summer of 2007 a controversial billboard appeared in downtown Windsor featuring a heroic painterly rendering of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the political and paramilitary group, Hezbollah, flanked by messages in English and Arabic commemorating their victory over Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in 2006.2 The sign went up on a CBS commercial billboard space for four days at a busy intersection in a Lebanese neighborhood. The sponsors of the billboard had the foresight to rent the space for the civic holiday weekend at the end of July: just enough time for controversy to emerge around the potential meaning of a sign in two languages, one distinctly foreign to status-quo Canadians. The English text stated: “The Lebanese and Arab communities in Windsor congratulate the Lebanese people for their steadfastness and endeavor to establish peace in Lebanon.” The Arabic text, it was immediately reported in the local newspaper, made reference to armed resistance: Hezbollah’s status as a terrorist organization in Canada was quickly cited as the rationale for the condemnation of the sign.3 As the first of three articles in the Windsor Star, it was the most inflammatory, setting the stage for a debate that spanned both sides of the border and quickly spread to news outlets in the Middle East. The loudest and most repeated commentary in the United States came from Debbie Schlussel, a conservative political blogger who suggested that the sign had been funded by the Arabic community in “Dearbornistan”—a derisive allusion to Dearborn, Michigan (a Detroit suburb), which has one of the largest Arab American populations in the United States.4 What Schlussel’s commentary did draw out, however, is the tension produced by the billboard’s relative proximity to the US border, a fact that was curiously absent in discussions from Canadian sources. Although the sign itself could not be directly seen from the US side (it was approximately 1 km from the international boundary), the symbolism of the border and the politics of location were critical to this media intervention. This fact was not lost on those commenting from Israel and Lebanon. Al-Manar.com ran a story with the headline “Sayyed Nasrallah on American Borders!!” a slight misinterpretation of the sign’s location, which was several blocks south of Windsor’s riverfront rather than directly on it. Nevertheless, the website embellished the scenario in reporting:

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“When you stand on the U.S. territories at the Detroit riverbank in Michigan State and look toward the opposite side, you will see a huge picture of Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah surrounded by a number of Lebanese figures.” Abed Foukara, managing editor for Al Jazeera’s Washington Bureau, echoed this interest in the sign’s location: “It’s fascinating that the billboard has come up in a part of the country where you can visibly see this side of the border.”5 While it was often implied that the sign was censored, the billboard’s sponsors had intentionally paid CBS Outdoors for the weekend only, fully understanding the increasingly charged politics of the Canada–US border and the momentum that could be gained by symbolically inserting the Israeli–Lebanon border controversy on the doorstep of the United States. “We paid for the weekend and it’s done,” said Hussein Dabaja, the main spokesman for the billboard, “We have our message, and our message got the point across.”6 Not since the culture wars of the early 1990s has there been such vigilant monitoring of what constitutes public art or public space more generally. However, what is unique to the more recent situations is how swift and carefully coordinated local governments and local media have been in their censure of political commentary that might seem to question the imperatives of the post-9/11 security agenda. If we can regard the US border as a form of nationalist spectacle as outlined in previous chapters, these billboards (and the controversy that has surrounded them) serve as a kind of minor counter-spectacle to subvert the increasingly dominant picture of the border as a site of danger. While the Mexico–US border is considered a much larger problem than the Canada–US border, in the last decade there has been a marked shift. This same territory is now seen as “defenseless” and the border has been frequently referred to as porous and threatening. Jason Ackleson argues that the shift in US security policy has been shaped by the framework of risk society which posits that the magnitude and impact of future threats cannot be precisely determined from the past, though they must be predicted and guarded against. This narrative shift has resulted in a number of early and unsubstantiated statements about 9/11 terrorists entering the US from Canada which have proven difficult to reverse. Ackleson writes that all US borders have been reconstructed since 9/11 as “gateways for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction” and that repeated “speech acts” by policy elites have worked to weave these claims centrally into security discourse.7 Janet Napolitano, former Secretary of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, pointed to the Canadian border as a significant security threat as late as 2009.8 In an era of Homeland Security, the border becomes a critical marker of self-definition, and the new focus on the Canadian border is part of a larger process of re-bordering and redefining American national territory as a “homeland.” In some instances, the Canadian border becomes the final frontier, a conventionally overlooked

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 183 grey zone that is culturally similar (or similar enough) to slip under the radar. For if the southern border that the United States shares with Mexico is already overdetermined, the loop around the homeland is completed by closing the northern door as well. In order to gauge the extent to which the perception of the Canadian border has shifted to meet the expectations of the security agenda, it is useful to look back to a public art project that was situated in Windsor near the foot the Ambassador Bridge (the entry point to Canada) in 1991, a decade prior to 9/11. At the outset of the First Gulf War, the Canadian artist, Jamelie Hassan, mounted a year-long billboard project that provided a reminder that smart bombs and “clean war” were not without repercussion (Figure 7.2). The image of a Baghdad mosque served as the

Figure 7.2 Because . . . there Was and there Wasn’t a City of Baghdad, Jamelie Hassan billboard/Artcite, 1991 (photo: John Tamblyn). (Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)

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backdrop for Hassan’s ambiguous statement: “Because . . . there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad” printed in segments across the sign. For Hassan, the billboard was at once a protest against the US war in Iraq, a portent of Baghdad as a future ruin and a memorial for a city where she had once lived as a student. While Hassan’s billboard did generate some controversy, there were no calls for its removal. Windsor has often called attention to Detroit as a border city by acting as a mirror to reflect the power that American and transnational media have had in shaping the War on Terror. The difference in response may be due to the re-imagination of Detroit as a border city within a larger American context in the last decade. At the outset of the First Gulf War, Detroit was a blind spot in American culture. Ironically, in 1980 Saddam Hussein was made an honorary citizen of Detroit when he was awarded with a “key to the city” as a gesture of gratitude for his support for Iraq’s exiled Chaldean Christian community that had relocated to Southeast Michigan in the 1970s.9 Thirty years ago, Saddam Hussein was seen to be an American ally after the oil crisis of the late 1970s and the Iran–Iraq war. Jamelie Hassan’s billboard followed Saddam Hussein’s visit to Detroit by a decade and although the tides had turned against Iraq by 1991, the spatial management of the border area had not yet been developed. These historical details suggest the extent to which the politics of this border have intensified both locally and internationally.

The Straits: Cross-Border Communication Historically, the Detroit–Windsor border was a site of contact and connection, but it now occupies an uncertain role as one of the many industrial remnant spaces in the Great Lakes Region, known as an area that one drives through on the way to other places such as Chicago or Toronto. The commercial value of freight passing through this region on transport truck or train is valued in the billions, surpassing all other ports of entry in North America. But the disparity between the value of trade that moves through the region and the investment in the civic infrastructure of the two cities is staggering. At the center of urban disinvestment in this industrialized, trans-border corridor is the Ambassador Bridge. Once a symbol of the region’s Gilded Age, it is currently an albatross that has created numerous problems as its truck traffic increased in the late 20th century. Thousands of trucks idle daily, waiting to cross the border and the levels of diesel particulate concentrations produced by the truck traffic are among the highest in North America.10 The Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel were products of Progressive Era urban industrialization, built as symbols of the emergent automobile empire in the late 1920s and early 1930s, just prior to the Great Depression. The international boundary line is marked in the middle

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 185 of each span by two flags, one Canadian, the other American, set side-byside. But these markings seem inconsequential as the declining infrastructure itself has come to represent the Canada–US border in an ongoing state of reconstruction and repair. The Ambassador Bridge crossing, in particular, has operated at the center of a large-scale debacle between private and public interests raising the issue around what role the Detroit–Windsor border crossing should play—in the middle of the rust belt, in the middle of a long-term recession—at the outset of the 21st century. In many ways the problems exemplified by this crossing and the territory it traverses reflect a larger problem: standing for the uncertain status of the Canada–US border, which, for many years, has been understood less as a physical boundary than as a variable line that separates the two countries. Windsor and Detroit occupy a unique position within the geography of the Canada–US border: the two cities form one of the largest urban border regions within North America. While the city centers are separated only by the Detroit River, which spans just a little over 500 meters at its narrowest point, the two places became increasingly disconnected by the end of the 20th century. Historically, this region was defined by the narrows of the Detroit River which connect Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, a natural transition point in the Great Lakes geography. Fort Ponchartrain du D’étroit, established by the French in 1701, took its name from the straits (étroit or narrows) between two land masses on the western frontier. Two hundred years later, as industry established and the city grew at the outset of the 20th century, the international crossings were established as engineering projects of vast proportions at the narrows of the Detroit River: the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit–Windsor tunnel symbolized the enthusiasm for cross-border industry in the wake of the emergent automobile empires. During the 20th century, Detroit’s location on the Canadian border enabled the “Border Cities,” a collection of towns that included Windsor, to become one of the first export-processing zones in the early 20th century when the American auto industry set up branch plants to gain access to tariff-free markets within the British Commonwealth. By the end of the 20th century, the economic integration of this region was deeply ingrained. Manufacturing logistics sent cars (in various stages of completion) back and forth across the international border multiple times before the finished product rolled off the assembly line in one of the many plants in Ontario, Michigan and Ohio.11 While the international crossings were once an advantage for Windsor and Detroit, they have more recently become a site of the competing forces of globalization where new border security mandates run counter to the flows of industrial production that still define the region. Here relations of proximity and distance are determined by border infrastructure, traffic volume and wait times, producing a fragmented cultural geography that

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is difficult to parse within existing lexicons of urbanism. But even before 2001 the Canada–US border served as a centrifugal force as populations on both sides gravitated out toward the edges of the metropolitan regions of the two cities, establishing new cities and townships at the peripheries. As a result of these pressures, the Windsor–Detroit region currently has much of its suburban population located away from the international border with inner-city neighborhoods left to contend with increased border traffic around both sides of the Ambassador Bridge. The cultural and geographic fragmentation produced on this border is particularly notable in Windsor where the border is the focal point formed by the Detroit skyline—an architectural horizon that is visible only from the Canadian side, suggesting that Detroit’s best view is not from within, but rather from the outside. Similarly, Windsor’s urban pretensions are bolstered from different vantage points: when entering the city from the freeway it is possible to mistake Detroit’s skyline as an extension of Windsor’s, thus creating a borderless optical illusion of a cityscape much larger than it is. The play of this architectural theatre between Windsor and Detroit is exaggerated by the scale of the sign for Caesars entertainment complex, which has the largest neon sign on Windsor’s waterfront. Caesars is part of an international consortium of casinos, which bought and expanded the existing locally owned casino in 2008. This behemoth complex takes up nearly three city blocks and has served to turn the surrounding streets into a series of empty wind tunnels. Caesars broadcasts its message to Detroit quite boldly. It is the most visible feature on the Windsor skyline when looking out across the Detroit River from Hart Plaza or the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. The Windsor-based arts collective Broken City Lab was founded in 2009 during the 2009–2010 economic recession. Their projects undertook forms of urban exploration, documentation and remapping the city to unearth the complex interrelations between Detroit’s and Windsor’s economic decline. An early project of theirs involved mapping the lines of sight within the city and locating places where small screens could be attached to posts and buildings to block the view of the Caesars casino sign, thus in their words, “improving the view of the city” from within. Broken City Lab has worked to devise an alternative communications strategy for the city of Windsor, one not dominated by advertisements for Caesars and Chrysler which flank the Detroit River on the Windsor side. In the winter of 2010, they arranged a series of impromptu digital projections called Cross-Border Communications on the empty front side of the Chrysler Building, facing Detroit (Figure 7.3). The scale of the projection was calculated by the size of the letters of the Caesars sign, which could be easily read from the Detroit waterfront. Cross-Border Communications broadcast a series of projected messages across the border to audiences in Detroit: these included “WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER” and “DETROIT IS OUR FUTURE.” The contrast between the oversized text and the brief,

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Figure 7.3 Cross-Border Communications, Broken City Lab, Windsor–Detroit border, 2009

Twitter-scaled messages temporarily opened up the space of the international border between the two cities. The intervention provided a brief respite from the empty corporate dominance of this space which has become increasingly abstracted as security regulations restrict who can cross and how. Passport regulations set in place since 2009 have quashed any casual contact between residents of the two cities and travel by car is necessary to gain entry to the tunnel or bridge.

Reading Detroit as a Border City: Military Urbanism The perception of the international border as a point of orientation is far less pronounced in Detroit. The city’s urban history is notably complex, internally bordered along racial lines and divided by the freeways that transported its population out to the suburbs in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.12 As a result, Detroit does not think of itself as an international “border city” as its own internal boundaries have created traumatic divisions symbolized in the wall at Eight Mile Road at Detroit’s northern limit, and at Altar Road where the city meets Grosse Pointe, an affluent suburb that brushes up against the city’s east end. While the automobile industry built Detroit, it also led to its destruction. Post-war housing policies and the interstate highway system that emerged mid-century

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worked in tandem with Detroit’s industries to create new consumer values that denigrated cities as outmoded 19th-century cultural forms. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, passed in 1956, was in large measure a Cold War military strategy that sought to disperse urban populations across larger areas so that Americans would not be susceptible to foreign bombing campaigns like those they had unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. So while Detroit did not suffer from military strikes it has still lost 900,000 inhabitants who left between 1950 and 2000. The announcement of Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings in 2013 seems to follow long-established policies of neglect at the federal and state levels which were set in motion during the 1950s when urban disinvestment was aided by the Federal Highways Act (1956) and housing policy that favored suburbanization over inner-city development.13 As such, Detroit became invisible to most Americans during the latter half of the 20th century. Ron Terada’s evocative road sign from 2005, YOU HAVE LEFT THE AMERICAN SECTOR/VOUS ÊTES SORTIS DU SECTEUR AMÉRICAIN, discussed earlier in the context of the Canadian border, can also be seen to comment on the ways in which Detroit itself is considered in its borderline condition as a frontier of an early 21st-century American Sector. While the sign was placed on the Canadian side of the border, it also suggested Detroit’s outsider status within American culture and its longstanding frontier situation or edge condition: this can be read from its earliest days as a colonial settlement at the westernmost periphery of France’s 17th-century trade explorations to the Great Rebellion of 1967. So while Detroit is not regarded as a border city, its liminal status has continued from its early days as a “frontier metropolis” to its role in testing the relationship between urban policy and military strategy in the post-war era discussed above.14 Detroit’s liminality in American culture continues even as its fortunes may be reversing. During the 2010 recession, the city became the poster child for urban bankruptcy: the Guardian and the New York Times frequently run articles on the city’s travails as national and international news. Detroit has come to stand as the world’s first capitalist ruin and as the world looks on from a distance the popularity of Detroit’s image has become known as ruin porn in a cottage industry of documentary films and coffee-table books. Detroit’s political and economic woes have come to stand for larger questions of American vulnerability at the same time that the city has become home to a large-scale Border Patrol complex that would seem to defy the level of external threat posed at the Canadian border. Since 2001, the number of agents in the Detroit Sector has increased ten-fold: from 40 agents to over 400, many with the trademark green and white patrol cars that are more visible than those belonging to the city’s own police force.15 The disparity between Detroit’s internal resources, which after its 2013

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 189 bankruptcy proceedings left the city unable to provide basic services for police and firefighters, and the augmented border patrol funding in the Detroit sector has left many questions about the logic of security that governs the region. Where there may not be clear answers to the gap between the internal instability of the city and the border patrol presence that has been building in Detroit, the perception of the city’s generalized borderline condition is one that is threatened from within as much as it is from the international border. Todd Miller notes the proximity between the Customs and Border Patrol complex at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge and the large Mexican community in Southwest Detroit. While this community was established in the 1920s, it grew rapidly after the establishment of NAFTA in the 1990s. Detroit’s Latin American immigrant population increased by 70 percent as the rest of the city experienced steep population declines. At the same time, the increase in Border Patrol agents stationed on the Canada–US border has increased by 300 percent since 2001.16 The uneasy relationship between this community and the Border Patrol goes back some time in history when in the early 1930s many Mexicans were deported through the Mexican Repatriation Program which continued throughout the Great Depression. Reports of internal immigration checks are again increasing from residents in this community.17 While the southern border of the United States is frequently thought of as more troublesome, this was not always the case. In 1924, when the Border Patrol was established, the Detroit sector was one of the most critical ports of entry during the Prohibition Era. At the same time, immigration from Ireland and Eastern Europe through Canada was on the increase, and Windsor was regarded as a key entry point for “backdoor” immigration to the United States. Some of the earliest issues with conformance to the emerging bureaucracy of the Immigration and Naturalization Services came from the Windsor–Detroit border, as the region’s urban identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was largely independent of the authority of INS whose mandates were established remotely. Thomas A. Klug writes of the difficulties that the INS encountered at the Windsor–Detroit crossing: the INS was responsible for national law enforcement in borderland contexts that often required accommodation to local realities. Nowhere was this more visible than at the Detroit–Windsor border crossing, which in the words of John Clark, the US commissioner of immigration based in Montreal, presented “one of the most, if not the most difficult problem with which we have to deal on the Canadian border.”18 This historical legacy of the Detroit Sector, combined with the city’s role as the “arsenal of democracy” and its subsequent chapters of urban unrest

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during the 20th century, play into the perception of fear and the increased border patrol presence in the city since 2002.

La Otra Frontera The current situation of internal instability in Detroit seems to have created a political vacuum where both powerful corporate interests and a growing surveillance culture have trumped basic environmental security in the region. Thus, the security apparatus at the border, which aims to prevent terrorist attacks and monitor a longstanding Mexican community, has at the same time turned a blind eye to environmental degradation that poses a more diffuse security threat to the region. This became apparent in 2013 when Koch Carbon dumped a three-story pile of petroleum coke (a waste product from the Alberta Tar Sands) in Southwest Detroit, directly on the banks of the Detroit River, near the Ambassador Bridge.19 This pile sat for months adjacent to the Ambassador Bridge and the Customs and Border Patrol station as a toxic hazard to the Detroit River and surrounding communities. During the summer of 2013, large black clouds of petcoke could be seen blowing across the river, blanketing the surrounding areas on both sides of the Windsor–Detroit border. The trans-border spectacle of heavy black clouds blowing over the Detroit River that summer fit well with the post-apocalyptic narrative of Detroit’s downfall that has made regular news in recent years. Video footage of these roving clouds was quickly posted on social media sites by environmental activists seeking to document the spread of the toxic waste material across the region. The petcoke clouds became the focus for a series of photographic stills by the Wiisaakodewinini (Métis) artist, Dylan Miner, who in turn reworked the video footage to highlight the extent of the pollution hovering over the Detroit River and the dissociated economies of extraction that appeared, tempest-like, on the horizon that summer. Agamiing, Awasaakwaa (On the Shore, Across the Forest), as his photographic series was called, resembled the sublime landscapes of J.M.W. Turner’s late paintings which implicated the slave trade, industrial capital and technology as a foreboding environmental eclipse, one that aesthetically tethered together beauty and destruction from the 19th century onwards. In Miner’s installation, however, the edge between sublime beauty and environmental neglect is caught squarely in the middle of Detroit River where the international boundary runs. In Miner’s Anishinaabe view to the Great Lakes watershed, this is the center of an “illegitimate border” between Canada and the US as it contravenes the Jay Treaty of 1794. This historic treaty recognizes the right of aboriginal peoples to travel at will across the border, but it has been approached differently between Canada and the US over the years and is increasingly vulnerable in the current political climate as post-9/11 security mandates have limited the meaning of mobility for First Nations, Métis and American Indians.20 The perspective framed by Miner’s Agamiing,

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 191 Awasaakwaa (On the Shore, Across the Forest) places the viewer at the center of the Detroit River where it possible to see what the land looked like prior to the establishment of the border (Figure 7.4). From the center of the Detroit River the borderline disappears as an abstraction, while from Detroit’s or Windsor’s shoreline the Canada–US border is visually formed by the river itself. The central perspective in these photographs calls attention to the conflict that the border presents from an Anishinaabe perspective. Where the Great Lakes provided sustenance and formed part of a vast network of migratory routes for indigenous peoples, the spatial management of the border, running as it does through four of the five Great Lakes, cuts across the region and destroys the unity of the Anishinaabe concept of land as a commons through national and private ownership. Thus, Miner’s simple act of re-framing the soot clouds over the Detroit river posits a complex violation of the Great Lakes waterways where the international border, private interests and extraction economies have combined head-on in a tumultuously gloomy scenario of destruction that contravenes the unity of the Anishinaabe worldview. Miner’s work calls upon us to envision the Canada–US borderlands and the Great Lakes Waterways differently, through critically remapping space from indigenous perspectives. In Windsor and Detroit, Miner organized a series of workshops for Chicano and indigenous urban youth on both sides of the border where they constructed a mobile screen printing press that was embedded in a cargo tricycle and equipped to print banners and flags that symbolized indigenous understandings of place. These workshops were

Figure 7.4 Agamiing, Awasaakwaa (On the Shore, Across the Forest), Dylan Miner, 2013

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part of Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes), an ongoing socially engaged art project that he initiated in 2012. Through the Turtle Island Aboriginal Centre in Windsor and the Raiz Up Collective in Southwest Detroit, Miner’s project sought to connect indigenous youth across the border, planning for the two groups to meet in Windsor. However, the youth groups were not entitled to travel under the Jay Treaty of 1794 as Miner had anticipated. This transborder project also spanned a heavily polluted industrial corridor that spans West Windsor and Southwest Detroit, an area that is normally dominated by transport trucks and heavy industry. In this context, the bikes suggested another mode of exchange and transportation, activating what Alicia Gaspar de Alba describes as an “alter-Native” culture that spans the border,21 negotiating its spaces through insisting upon both Chicano and indigenous presence that have long been a part of the Detroit–Windsor region. Miner refers to “la otra frontera” as a Chicano/a space produced in Southwest Detroit as a community on the edge of the US–Canada border. Here, in an unexpected twist of geographic reason, Windsor (and Canada) lie south of Detroit (and the US) in one of many anomalies of the Canada–US borderline. Complicating our expectations further, Miner reads Southwest Detroit as “la (otra) frontera” decoupling the location of Chicana/o culture from the southern borderlands of the US. The unique visual culture of Southwest Detroit’s murals Miner reads in terms of a specific “MiChicana/o” culture that has been established in Michigan on the northern border of the US since the beginning of the 20th century when Mexican workers came to Detroit to work in the burgeoning auto industry and later as agricultural workers throughout the state. Miner interweaves these histories of labor migration to the northern border within the context of Aztlán as a creation/migration narrative that considers Aztlán as an axis mundi that extends far beyond the southwest. In Miner’s estimation: Southwest Detroit is the borderlands par excellence: situated between the United States and Canada, divided by the violence of the highway, marginalized by the regional Southwest-centrism of the Chicana/o community, and operating as a brown-skinned neighborhood in the black–white racial dynamics of a northern city. Following the openendedness of Anzaldúa’s frontera, I hope to expand our working definition of la (otra) frontera to incorporate the complexities of MiChicana/o experiences. After all, la frontera cannot be encapsulated simply by the geopolitics of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.22 Reading the Detroit–Windsor border as “la (otra) frontera,” Miner sets in motion an important series of displacements that situate the continued frontier status of this trans-border urban region.

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 193

Transborder Ruin: From Indian Road and Huron Church Line to Michigan Central Station The cities of Detroit and Windsor sit at the intersection of trade and migration routes that were established long before the international border was set down the middle of the Detroit River. Windsor’s major thoroughfares, from Tecumseh Road and Wyandotte Street to Huron Church Road trace the 19th-century British recording of transportation routes used by the Ojibwe/Chippewa and Huron/Wyandot peoples. However, a smaller residential street simply called Indian Road runs parallel to the Ambassador Bridge and serves as an ambivalent reminder of both the French and British colonial past as well as the uncertain status of a nearly century-old bridge that spans the international crossing. Indian Road was named after the Huron burial mounds that were found on-site before the land was developed in the 19th century, but in the last decade this street and the surrounding neighborhood have been caught in the midst of debate surrounding the future of the Ambassador Bridge, which is the main transport crossing between the two cities. Since 2007, most of the houses along Indian Road have been boarded up and abandoned after being purchased from the Detroit International Bridge Company (the parent company that owns the Ambassador Bridge) in its bid to build a twin span alongside the historic bridge which is structurally unsound for the longterm capacity of truck traffic that it carries. The houses that have been purchased by the DIBC have been strategically neglected by the company in its pursuit to double its span and customs plaza despite opposition and lack of zoning approval at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Prior to the DIBC’s purchase of these houses in 2007, Indian Road was a quiet, well maintained residential street. Now much of it lies in ruin and is irreparable.23 At the other end of the Ambassador Bridge, Michigan Central Station stands as the most iconic ruin in Detroit, playing the role of ground zero in the city’s narrative of decline. This hulking Beaux-Arts structure has become Detroit’s most contentious property. Erected in 1913 by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem, the same architectural firm that built New York City’s Grand Central Station, it has been empty since 1988 when the last Amtrak train pulled out of the station. In the last decade it has been rented out to Hollywood film producers for cop shows and disaster movies at prices up to ten thousand dollars per day. Detroit City Council voted in 2009 to tear down Michigan Central Station, a fate that was only forestalled by the cost of its demolition, which neither the City nor the building’s owner would finance. Michigan Central Station is one of many properties owned by the DIBC and it continues to be used as a pawn in a larger power game within the border region. The fate of the building remains uncertain but for the moment it serves as a projection screen for two speculative economies. The first is centered on the idea of Detroit as

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spectacle, the demolition capital of the world and the graveyard for American civilization as seen from the perspective of Time magazine and Hollywood; while the second might be understood broadly to constitute a counter-spectacle, based in a variety of social practices, projects that take Detroit at face value and offer challenges to the standard logic of economic development which continuously begins anew with each city administration. This phenomenon of urban research in Detroit has a venerable legacy that has been building over forty years. The work of the radical geographer Bill Bunge, whose early mapping projects in the 1960s examined racial segregation patterns emerging between Detroit and its neighboring suburbs, has been re-discovered by architects and urbanists around the world. Likewise Tyree Guyton’s longstanding Heidelberg Project has received widespread critical acclaim and more attention recently than it has in its previous two decades. However, the range of urban re-mapping projects in both Windsor and Detroit has intensified. These have sought to call attention to the larger forces that have precipitated the economic collapse as well as the urban and industrial ruin that pervades the Detroit–Windsor border itself. The transportation corridor that spans Huron Church Line and Indian Road in Windsor, across the Ambassador Bridge and into Southwest Detroit where Michigan Central Station sits adjacent to the international crossing, forms a large transborder network of freeways and feeder roads that has become more complex since 2001. The decaying industrial properties surrounding the Ambassador Bridge on the Detroit side, which includes Michigan Central Station, are the mirror image of Indian Road in Windsor. These properties initially appear abandoned, though upon second glance it becomes evident that they form a security zone that lies in waiting, boarded up and surrounded by chain-link fence and razor wire. Victor Konrad refers to this strategy of spatial acquisition at the border as “blockbusting” to accommodate the “expansion and enhancement of security space” needed at the border.24 The partitioning and subdividing of space in this corridor of Detroit and Windsor forms a border zone that has been functionally disabled. While many have questioned why these properties seem to perpetually lie in wait for demolition or some other form of repurposing, these sites have also been bracketed out as hypothetical questions by artists’ collectives as to their role in the larger designs of the region. The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency began their investigation of Detroit’s value system at Michigan Central Station where they placed one of their trademark lawn signs in front of the iconic structure, thus shifting the field of vision from a nostalgic view of 20th-century ruin to a hypothetical framework of economic speculation. Across the border in Windsor the collective Dodolab conducted a walking tour of Indian Road that was led by “Professor William Starling,” a character modeled after a Victorian dandy, who surveyed the border zone in costume examining each of the boarded-up homes from the sidewalk. As an invasive species introduced on

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 195 a literary whim during the 19th century, the starling provides a fitting metaphor for the takeover and colonization of the spaces of the Windsor–Detroit borderlands where the regional or native presence is overwritten by forces and flows that outcompete local needs and desires.

Frontier Metropolis The city of Detroit celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2001. Founded by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701, Detroit is one of the oldest continuous European settlements in North America. Brian Leigh Dunnigan refers to Detroit as a “frontier metropolis” one of the earliest inland settlements where the French established military and trading presence.25 Little remains of this early site other than a few maps indicating approximately where Fort Pontchartrain was located in relation to the contemporary urban plan. However, the idea of Detroit as a frontier city still survives into the 20th and 21st centuries: the city and the region have served as a test site for large-scale war-time industrial production, car culture and urban sprawl. During the 20th century, the cities of Detroit and Windsor also became a proving ground for the logistics of cross-border industrial assembly and leveraging of labor costs across international lines. But the cities have also served as a test site for border patrol practices during periods of transition, both in the 1920s and now as the Canada–US border has come under increased scrutiny again. Where the US–Mexico border has long been a site for the cultural production of dissent, resistance and resilience to mainstream American views on migration and security, the Canada–US border figures less prominently as a cultural issue even though it has changed significantly over the last decade. While we hear constantly about the economic burdens of the Canada–US border, its cultural politics are more technological and abstract.26 However, the securitization of this border has put cities like Windsor and Detroit (the only pair of contiguous border cities on the Canada–US border) more in league with border cities along the US– Mexico border in terms of a widening gulf between residents on either side. Where it was not uncommon a decade ago to cross the border to go for lunch in a border city like Detroit–Windsor or Juárez–El Paso, passport and security regulations (in addition to the perception of violence–very real in Juárez, and mostly imagined in Detroit) have made cross-border visits decline precipitously. While comparisons between cities on the US–Mexico border and the Detroit–Windsor border may seem far-fetched, pointed analogies have been made in different contexts. In a promotional video for Juárez-based assembly plants from the late 1990s Bruce Greenwood, Sales Engineer for General Laser, proudly stated that “Juárez is the new Detroit. There’s no question about it.”27 This sales pitch for maquiladora manufacturing resonates in more sobering contexts too: Jonathan Contreras, a native Detroiter and immigration rights activist

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referred to Detroit as the “Ciudad Juárez of the United States.”28 While the murder rates between the most dangerous city in Mexico and that of the United States are far apart, the experimental status of these two border cities has often brought them into a vague comparison. The borderlands of the southern US and northern Mexico have come to constitute a unique, though contested cultural region that has produced its own set of experimental geographies and imagined borderlands. The US–Mexico border is often considered as the beginning of a global division that traverses the world, separating the poverty of the global South from the concentrated wealth of the global North. But this metaphor of the southern border of the US as a tidy division or a distinct divide papers over the internal disparities within North America that have emerged as transnational industry, has migrated out of the rust belt of the US and Canada, first to Mexico and now across the globe to Southeast Asia. The movements of global capital that produced the US–Mexico border as a neoliberal experiment in low-wage export-processing zones from the 1960s onwards also served to empty out cities like Detroit during the same period. Where the city of Detroit has been traversed by spatial divisions and boundaries that separated class and race, the idea of the international border as a significant territorial demarcation along its southern edge is relatively new. Windsor has historically played a supporting role in Detroit’s history, having little identity outside its American branch plants, its whiskey joints and its strip clubs all serving different sectors of Detroit’s economy. But it is this small city on the southern bank of the Detroit River that now holds up a mirror to Detroit as a “borderama” spectacle, one produced through the media relays and security zones that have emerged between the two countries.

Notes 1 Jerry Herron, “Borderland/Borderama/Detroit: Part 1,” Places Journal, July 2010. Accessed March 25, 2015 at: https://placesjournal.org/article/ borderama-detroit-1 2 See my previously published essay “Road Signs on the Border” at: http:// sac.sagepub.com/content/14/4/384 for image link. 3 Chen Dalston, “Sign Splits Lebanese; Riles Jews,” Windsor Star, August 11, 2007. Accessed June 29, 2015 at: www2.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story. html?id=9e4885a7-c3ac-4280-881d-1f83d903b7be&k=45311&p=2 4 Debbie Schlussel, “Windsor Hezbollah Billboard Removed; Well-Known Hezbollah Family Involved,” Windsor Star, August 13, 2007. Accessed June 29, 2015, at: www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2007/08/windsor_hezboll. html 5 Trevor Wilhelm, “Windsor Hezbollah Sign Draws International Attention,” Windsor Star, August 15, 2007. Accessed April 15, 2015 at: www.canada.com/ windsorstar/story.html?id=94551c4e-f13e-435a-8e7e-0615bd5bb788&k= 75758

Detroit’s Borderama Spectacle 197 6 Trevor Wilhelm, “Backers Defend Controversial Sign,” Windsor Star, August 13, 2007. Accessed April 15, 2015 at: www.canada.com/windsorstar/story. html?id=3cd3ef3c-0286–48d4-a9dd-c99ad032c89d&k=47392 7 Ackleson, “Border Security in Risk Society,” 6. 8 Audrey Hudson, “Napolitano’s Priority: Canada Border,” Washington Times, January 26, 2009. Accessed June 29, 2015 at: www.washingtontimes.com/ news/2009/jan/26/canadian-border-key-priority-in-napolitano-securit 9 Rachel Aviv, “Saddam Hussein’s Key to the City of Detroit,” Bidoun Magazine, 14 (2008): 32–34, 34. 10 The Economist (Infrastructure), “They Aren’t Building That: Michigan is Getting a Swanky New International Bridge. Canada is Paying,” September 29, 2012. Accessed June 29, 2015 at: www.economist.com/node/21563756 11 Herbert Colling and Carl Morgan, Pioneering the Auto Age (Windsor, ON: Benchmark Publishing, 1993), 6. 12 Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 181–208. 13 Kyong Park, Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2005), 36. See also, Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 14 Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 2. 15 Miller, Border Patrol Nation, 165. 16 Miller, Border Patrol Nation, 161. 17 Miller, Border Patrol Nation, 163. See also, Daniel Danvir, “The Paradox of Mexicantown: Detroit’s Uncomfortable Relationship with the Immigrants it Desperately Needs,” The Atlantic: City Lab, September 24, 2012. Accessed March 26, 2015 at: www.citylab.com/housing/2012/09/paradox-mexicantowndetroits-uncomfortable-relationship-immigrants-it-desperately-needs/3357 18 Thomas A. Klug, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Making of a Border-Crossing Culture on the US–Canada Border, 1891–1941,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 40: 3 (2010): 395–415, 399. 19 The piles were eventually shipped to China and Mexico where the coal-like substance is burned for fuel, although it was initially unclear who was responsible for the large waste piles or how long they would stay there. Ian Austen, “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste is Rising over Detroit,” New York Times, May 17, 2013. Accessed March 30, 2015 at: www.nytimes.com/ 2013/05/18/business/energy-environment/mountain-of-petroleum-coke-fromoil-sands-rises-in-detroit.html 20 Richard Wagamese, “First Nations Face Border Struggles,” Canadian Geographic, July/August 2010. Accessed April 2, 2015 at: www.canadiangeographic. ca/magazine/ja10/first-nation-border-struggles.asp#cgsidebar 21 Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 7. 22 Dylan Miner, “Straddling la otra frontera: Inserting MiChicana/o Visual Culture into Chicana/o Art History,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 33: 1 (2008), 102–112, 109. 23 Dave Bagatello, “Homeowners Surrounded by Indian Road Slum File Lawsuit against Ambassador Bridge Company,” Windsor Star, August 19, 2013.

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25 26

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Accessed April 12, 2015 at: http://blogs.windsorstar.com/2013/08/19/home owners-surrounded-by-indian-road-slum-file-lawsuit-against-bridge-company Victor Konrad, “Borders and Culture: Zones of Transition, Interaction and Identity in the Canada–United States Borderlands,” Eurasia Border Review, 5: 1 (2014): 41–58, 48. Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis, 2. See Chapter 4, “Canada as the Borderline Case: ‘Outer’ America and the Northern Frontier,” for a history of Canada’s economic and cultural relationship to the border. MFI International Flexible Manufacturing Services, “Industry Experts Expect Boom to Continue to at Least 2020.” Accessed April 6, 2015 at: http://info. mfiintl.com/blog/topic/juarez-manufacturing Jonathan Contreras as quoted in Miller, Border Patrol Nation, 163.

Conclusion

Many of the questions posed in this book were informed by my experience living and working in the Windsor–Detroit border region over the last decade, but my curiosity about borders arose earlier while I was completing doctoral studies in the UK. Like most people in the world, I didn’t experience the events of September 11, 2001 within the US but rather from the capital of an older empire, one that was actively being reconfigured as the epicenter of a global future. It was here, in 2003, that I had a glimpse of the implications of being undocumented when my passport was deemed “lost” for an extended period of time. Paradoxically, this meant that I couldn’t leave the UK, but nor could I continue working or studying upon the expiry of my visa. As a Ph.D. student from Canada, I didn’t fit the typical profile of an undocumented person, but I got a sense of how quickly your identity could be pulled out from beneath you, retracted like a proverbial rug, when I found myself without travel documents. The UK Home Office, where I had naïvely sent my visa for renewal processing seemed like the monolith from the film 2001, an enigmatic and silent force out on the North Sea. My limited interaction with the Home Office over the course of a year consisted of a voice recording, always the same, that told me in essence that never would I speak to a person there and that my status continued to be uncertain. This is not the familiar story of the undocumented involving deportation or abuse, but on my return to Canada it took a lawyer and nearly two years to clear my identity from whatever list my name had landed on. That I am a person born on the side of privilege who has spent time in the limbo of un-documentation suggests the extent of chaos and confusion behind the myriad policies struck in the name of global security. At the close of this book, questions around migration and citizenship are only more heightened; this manuscript goes to publication amid escalating crises in Europe and the Middle East, and during a significant shift of governments in both Canada and the US. However, on the eve of the 2016 US election, the rhetoric around security and fear remains essentially the same: more calls for heightened border security among Republicans and more questions for both Mexico and Canada around

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political autonomy as both countries continue to be singled out as source material for the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” even though these campaigns are no longer named as such. In spite of the long duration of these ambiguous wars, in North America we still seem ill-equipped to recognize their operations. The 40-year “War on Drugs” has, since 2006, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 people in Mexico, and, since 2001, the “War on Terror” has led to approximately 300,000 casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. These places are only the most evident in an unfinished geography of British and American colonial interests that Derek Gregory describes as “the Colonial Present.” War is carefully presented as something that takes place beyond our borders, and the security regimes set in place over the last decade suggest that conflict originates outside the continental US. Extending Michel Foucault’s observation that “politics is the continuation of war by other means,” we might also say that many of the world’s borders operate as war by other means. This is certainly the case with the border walls that have gone up between Israel and Palestine and between Mexico and the United States or within Iraq under American military occupation. The imagined geography of Fortress America remains a popular ideal. The saber-rattling and ongoing concern about the threat posed by the Canadian border have re-appeared in the media as the political theatre of the 2016 Republican debate coincides with Prime Minister Trudeau’s announcement to accommodate 25,000 Syrian refugees seeking entry into Canada. The ambiguity of the Canadian border continues to surface as a point of contention in American politics as it is bound up in the ambiguity of Canadian culture and fraught with the tension between the unfinished narratives of past settler colonialism and the recognition of contemporary decolonial struggles. The US–Mexico border unambiguously cleaves the continent in half, and its unresolved tensions remain as strong as they were in the 19th century. In this light, it is more important than ever to see borderlines as shifting and impermanent representational constructs, porous and permeable interfaces that offer the possibility of political change and negotiation.

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Index

19th-Century Boundary Surveys: Canada-U.S. 41–48; indigenous issues 44–48; U.S-Mexico Report 29–36 Adams, Rachel 112–113 Alba, Alicia Gaspar de 153 Anderson, Benedict 79 Andreas, Peter 162 Anzaldúa, Gloria 153 Balibar, Etienne 60–61 Basualdo, Carlos 167 Baudrillard, Jean 145 Bartol, Alana 109–110 Berland, Jody 105–106 Biemann, Ursula 164, 171 Bigo, Didier 146 Bishop, Claire 169 Boeri, Stefano (Border Devices) 146 Border Art Workshop/Taller de arte Fronterizo 157, 160 Border Patrol Museum 79–84 Braz, Albert 17, 121 Broken City Lab 186–187 Brown, Wendy 8, 82, 91 Canadian Rangers 115 Canclini, Néstor GarcÍa 164 Carroll, Amy Sara 138, 139 Chambers, Samuel 135 Chang, Kornel 50 Checkpoint Charlie 85–91, 178 citizenship: experimental 167; insurgent 169 Cruz, Teddy 165–169 Curnoe, Greg 107, 109, 111

decolonial aesthetics 172; see also Mignolo, Walter; Vàzquez, Rolando De Leon, Jason 132–133 Department of Homeland Security 61, 62 Detroit: Chicano/a history 189, 192; comparison with Juárez 196; Detroit Sector Border Patrol 189; media perception 188 DEW Line 117, 118 Divine, Bonnie 119 Dominguez, Ricardo 128, 139 Elden, Stuart 48, 57, 60 Electronic Disturbance Theatre 139; see also Carroll, Amy Sara; Dominguez, Ricardo Expo ‘67 107, 113 frontera 153, 190, 192 frontier: American 96; Anzaldúa, Cold War 92; Gloria 28; King, Geoff 51; McManus, Sheila 37; Raffestin, Claude 28, 38; Turner, Frederick Jackson 39, 61; see also frontera Foucault 67–69, 134–135 Gómez-Pena, Guillermo 157–159 G8 and G20 trade summits (2010) 102–104 Hassan, Jamelie 183 Herron, Jerry 180 homeland 59 Homeland 56 Humboldt, Alexander von 36, 109–110

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Index

Idle No More 148, 149 indigenous lands: Cree 40; Dene 13, 104, 115; Inuit 113, 115; Mohawk 120; Nunavut 114; Nunavut (Territory) 114–115; Ojibwe 43–45, 119–120, 123; Seminole 34–36; Tohono O’odham 36–37, 173 inSITE 163 Jay Treaty (1794) 25, 190 Johnson, Sarah Anne 116–117 Juárez-El Paso border 141–143, 170–172 Kaplan, Amy 59, 70, 129 McLuhan, Marshall 100–101, 104, 108 Margolles, Teresa 170–172 Mauermuseum 79, 85–90, 91 Métis 17, 104, 115, 121, 190; see also indigenous lands Mezzadra, Sandro 164, 166; see also Neilson, Brett Michelson, Alan 120–121 Mignolo, Walter 155, 173 Miner, Dylan 17, 190–192 Minutemen Project 63–64, 160–161; see also vigilante organizations Mirzoeff, Nicholas: counterinsurgency 63, 66, 129; post panoptic visuality 58, 66 Mitchell, W.J.T. 26 NAFTA 109, 131, 165, 180 Neilson, Brett 164, 166; see also Mezzadra, Sandro Nichol, Heather 114 “Nordicity” 108, 111, 113, 116, 118 Nunavut 111–115; see also indigenous lands Nye, Joseph 78, 84, 94 Oppenheim, Dennis 24–25 Paul, Ian Alan 136–137 Pegler-Gordon, Anna 49 political equator 3; see also Cruz, Teddy postcommodity 173–175 Project Veritas 162; see also vigilante organizations ProNAF (Programa Nacional Fronterizo) 94, 143

Proyecto Juárez 163 Pupchek, Leanne 113 Ramirez, Marcos ERRE 154, 151 Ranciere, Jacques: dissensus 58, 68–69, 78, 85, 174; emancipated spectator 169; insecurity principle 134–146; “Police” 129 Rickard, Jolene 148–149 Romero, Fernando 130 Romo, Oscar 166–167 Ross, Kristin 78 Saez, Cesar 127 San Ysidro-Tijuana Border 165–169 Schott, Arthur 32–34 Shields, Rob 100, 108, 118 Sierra, Santiago 163, 171 Smith, Sarah, E.K. 106 Straw, Will 138 Taller Yonke 163 Téllez, Javier 163 Terada, Ron 178, 188 terror television 69–72 territory 57 Thresholds Along the Frontier (exhibition) 77–79, 92 Tocqueville, Alexis de 145 Tug Collective 173 Turner, Camille 109–110 Vàzquez, Rolando 173 vigilante organizations: Frontiersmen (American) 64–65; Frontiersmen (British Commonwealth) 65; Minutemen Project, 63–64; Project Veritas 162 visuality: Amoore, Louise 50; post panoptic visuality see Mirzoeff, Nicholas: post panoptic visuality; racial profiling 49–50 Windsor-Detroit border: Anishinaabe perspective 191; Arabic community 181; environmental destruction 190; manufacturing and deindustrialization 184–185, 193–195; military urbanism 187–188; settler-colonial history 193; vigilance and “mission creep” 104 Zemans, Joyce, 107