The project “Alterna(rra)tives in the Canada-US Borderlands” deals with the “other” border in North America and aims at retracing the function of this border in the formation and consolidation of the two North American nations. Taking Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Harold Adam Innis’ Staples Thesis as starting points, this project will show how borders are constitutional not only of nation-states, but also of nation-based cultural, somatic and libidinal corpo-realities. Focusing on key border scenarios in the making of the 49th parallel, I will show that the formation of territories and bodies are inherently interwoven, thus making ‘the’ border a texture whose analysis necessarily requires a theorization of socioeconomic structures, institutions and flows. In the conceptual imaginary that I want to develop, the geo-political border itself stops being a suture sowing together two different and distinct national fabrics, and becomes a texture: a complex and multi-dimensional trope and topos woven of numerous threads, such as politics, economy, cultural practices, racial, sexual and other discourses, which combine and intersect to create a trans-national continuum. Drawing from Sandro Mezzadra’s proposal to approach borders not simply as objects of study, but, through concepts such as labor, also as methods, my project will develop an appropriate methodology for the analysis of “alternar(rra)tives in the Canada-US borderlands.”

Building on recent scholarship at the intersection of Transhemispheric Studies, Performance Studies, Diversity Studies, Border Studies, Queer Studies, and Indigenous Studies, I want to analyze a series of “alterna(rra)tives,” that is alternative forms of knowledge which often rest hidden in dominant narratives of the archive, which can be carved out through decolonial readings of canonical texts. They can also be found in contemporary texts. Foremostly, they have also been restored in literary, performative texts, and artworks (e.g. the novels of Thomas King and the performance pieces of Kent Monkman).

Performance theory, as Diana Taylor has powerfully shown, can contribute to the restitution of silenced practices, offering useful analytical tools in the analysis of alternative forms of knowledges. A shift to a performance studies will allow me to identify a series of bordering practices and analyze them not only as texts or narratives, but as “scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description.” (Taylor, Archive 16). My analyses of selected historical, cultural and fictional border scenarios will be performed in a decolonial mode (Mignolo and Quijano), which looks beyond the fixation on “white” settlers and settler-colonial civilization to include the thought and culture of people constitutively erased from narratives of nations, territories, bodies and borders.

Drawing on Diana Taylor’s study The Archive and the Repertoire, this project explores the ways in which Indigenous experience and cultural memory are mediated in contemporary graphic art. Using as a starting-point the observation that there has been a shift from traditional forms of conveying cultural memory to multimedial and multimodal forms of its transmission, the investigation will center on scenarios that make it possible to substitute both archival knowledge (often gathered by non-Indigenous persons) and traditional ways of preserving cultural memory (practiced by the Indigenous themselves) through new forms of the embodiment and performance of the same. Both Indigenous experience and Indigenous cultural memory are thus approached in ways that consider and reflect the transformations that have occurred in the fields of art forms, art production, and the reception of art. Of particular interest will be aspects of hybridity and heterogeneity, whether in terms of the artistic styles used (at times a mixture of cultural inspirations) or the generic mobility that manifests itself in transitions from oral storytelling and carving to both manga and Western-style comic, or the media variety in which these artistic products are presented to their recipients, ranging, for example, from watercolour paintings and murals to printed books, posters, and animated films. This extended repertoire presenting cultural memory will furthermore be read as a strategy of decolonization on the part of the artists, through the production of both counter-hegemonic ‘discourses’ and transcultural artistic experiments.

I examine sites at the US-Mexico borderline that provide space for the performance of activities of social privilege, such as tourism, international trade, sports, and the arts. These places, in their distinct ways, create an atmosphere of being disconnected from the immediate perils and evils of the borderlands: illegal trade and undocumented immigration. At the same time these places are shaped by the militarization of the U.S.' Southern border since the 1990s and the post-9/11 security regime: The closed and guarded fence and border patrol agents are visible and mark the places as part of the border blockade. Although the three distinct places contribute to cross-border contacts and exchange, they, as well as their use by border people and visitors, contribute to bordering practices and to normalizing the militarized border.

• How are forms of mobility constructed in the borderlands?
• What kind of mobilities are welcome by the border regimes?
• What kind of hierarchies of mobility do the controlled borderlands create?

The project explores Florida as a zone of circum-Atlantic and circum-Caribbean encounter and as site of multiple black (im)mobilities throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Diverging from colonialist representions of the peninsula first as a disordered frontier and later as a tropical addition to the nation’s territory that were based on “variations of the theme of manifest destiny” (Roach 199), it focuses on the "uncanonized" and unacknowledged routes and untold stories of black people from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States who moved across Florida. While slaves were funnelled illegally from the West Indies to Georgia and the Carolinas via Florida, the peninsula also harbored maroon communities of fugitive slaves who had fled from plantations in these states, and who often continued their journey to the Bahamas. In the later 19th century Florida attracted migrants from Cuba who built and worked in the tobacco industry in Tampa and who interacted with European immigrants and African Americans in multicultural communities. The project explores scenarios of encounter and conflict in Florida as they are represented in cultural documents and narratives, such as the ex-slave narratives collected in the Federal writers project by Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Farrell and other black writers, 19th century historical writings about black fugitive movements in Florida, memoirs by Black Cuban writers such as Evelio Grillo, but also tourist guides, postcards and exhibition catalogs that depict Florida as a site of black invisibility and immobility and that enact supposedly timeless colonialist scenarios of tropicality. The aim of the project is to explore the multiple black mobilities and immobilities in Florida, the corresponding networks that locate Florida in a hemispheric and circum-Atlantic context, and the representation of these (im)mobilities in cultural discourses and narratives.

Works Cited
Joseph Roach. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP 1996.

This project looks at how nature was constructed and instrumentalized in settler scenarios of the 19th century in the US and Canada and at how such nature paradigms are reflected and subverted in recent ecocritical writings. Settler colonialism defined nature and wilderness in view of colonialist agendas and national ideologies. Discourses on nature, which involved the resettlement of indigenous people, predator control as well as the banning or acceptance of certain plants hence reflect cultural values and attitudes related to mobilities, community, nation, governance, civilization, and a desired future. Minor mobilities in this project are understood as those which an anthropocentric worldview regards and defines as minor but which, in a holistic or biocentric worldview are of equal importance and consequence as human migration and history of settlement. Colonization installed racial and cultural hierarchies in which subordinate groups “were often feminized, associated, like contemporary British women, with the body and its unruly passions, denied the capacity for reason,” thus needing “protection” from the colonizers (Hutchings 2009: 27). However as Tim Fulford among others has shown in Romantic Indians transatlantic traffic “‘Indianized parts of British culture’ even as it anglicized aspects of Native American society’ in a ‘two-way process’ of hybridization” (6) that affected Romantic literature and literary philosophy in important ways […] Native Americans, in short, were vital figures in the formation of early Romanticism: their bodies, their customs, their society, and, above all, their oral poetry influenced Romanticism’s content and form (155)” (quoted in Hutchings 2009: 26).

In a first step I want to look at how nature trafficking and the construction of a particular, nationally and colonially informed nature in settler colonialist scenarios shaped the literature of the US and Canada. In a second step I want to examine ecocritical texts, especially ecopoetry, which reverse the settler scenario by re-including indigenous knowledges in re-thinking the relationship of the subject to the land. Unlike prose texts, poetry opens up a realm for experiencing rather than simply describing forms of dwelling, inhabitation, and settlement that rethink settler colonialist scenarios and include oral, performative forms and indigenous rituals. I will in particular investigate the essayistic and poetic oeuvre of Gary Snyder and Don McKay.

This project theorizes the minor mobilities of women performers at the Western spectacle. It negotiates, first, the transatlantic and transnational mobilities of Buffalo Bill's Wild West (1890s-1906) to continental Europe. Secondly, it examines the cultural (re)productions of Annie Oakley's life and persona to show how her case represents various instances of "minor" mobilities that engage the gendered myth of the American Western cowboy and settler colonial epistemologies. As archetype of the cowgirl, Annie establishes a character eternally minor to a dominant masculine norm. To addresses girlhood and settler colonial intimacies in performance, I employ Diana Taylor’s concept of the repertoire as embodied memory and presentist practice. Within the settler colonial scenario of the Western spectacle, Oakley’s performance (including gestures, stage persona, and her shooting act) comprises both reiterated and unique behavior and requires audiences to situate themselves in relation to the West and her reactivation of the frontier scenario.

In Jack London’s diverse and sometimes controversial writings, one finds—contrary to a longstanding critical accord—not one grand spatial narrative of (im)mobility imposed on the peripheral, wild, and ‘exotic’ places whose inhabitants and cultures took center stage at the height of US imperialism around the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas American foreign policies reframed the world in the service of the nation’s economic and military interests, the views of many readers who first encountered these formerly unknown and marginal regions were shaped by London's stories, whose plots play out in places like the South Sea or the liminal epistemic regimes of the Canadian and Mexican borderlands.

Operating on these geographical and discursive margins, London’s stories engender literary geographies by depicting non-traditional spatial imaginations and practices that regularly transcend the literary nativism commonly associated with the naturalist genre. This project sets out to explore London’s short stories and sports coverage discuss the unstoried condition of subaltern actors and their spatial agency in turn-of-the-century mobility place-making processes. In doing so, the project recognizes the topic of minor mobilities as an understudied yet central theme in London’s writings. This is exemplified by the categorical fluidity of the national and transnational, static geopolitical realities and versatile visions of mental movement, and underscored by the tendency of London’s protagonists to constantly oscillate between politico-economic borderedness and cerebral-naturalistic boundlessness.

In the context of the settler scenarios project group and the overall objectives of the European Network for Minor Mobilities in the Americas (ENMMA), my research therefore asks how London’s literary spatializations relate to the historical, rhetorical, and semantic framework of settler colonialism in the Americas. To answer this question, it will scrutinize which "culturally specific imaginaries" (Taylor 13) inform the examined texts with regard to spatial configurations such as interethnic contact zones, civilizational peripheries, and the natural ideation of the nation-state. Finally, the project is interested in examining how London’s texts discursively frame the interplay between individuals, social structures, and natural environments.

Works Cited
Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke UP, 2003.