Open Border, Open Road: The Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Road Narrative

“Open Border, Open Road: The Anglo-Canadian Road Narrative” tells a new story about the contemporary Anglo-Canadian road narrative, a genre that I argue came into fruition with the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway. The dissertation traces how the contemporary Anglo-Canadian road genre maps a recalibrated sense of Canadian identity as Canadians adapted to shifting American-Canadian relations in the post-WWII period. I read the Trans-Canada Highway—and the road narrative that results from the construction of that highway—as a signal for the decreasing distance of Canada from the United States, particularly in relation to industrial-production capacities, capitalist economy, and liberal-democratic rights in the post-WWII period. Accordingly, I argue that the contemporary Anglo-Canadian road narrative mediates between affective attachments to the Canadian nation—whether expressed through spatial relations, historical relations, or narratives of economic advancement—and anxieties over the deterritorializing and denationalizing potential of this closer relation with the United States and with American ideals. While the effects of America on Canadian identity have been variously analyzed, particularly in relation to the field of border studies (e.g. Angus; Berland; McLuhan; Roberts; Siemerling and Phillips Casteel; Wyile), my dissertation argues for a more genealogical approach to this study of Canadian identity; an approach realized by mapping shifting aesthetics from the post-WWII period to our contemporary moment. While the first chapter of “Open Border, Open Road” traces the development of Trans-Canada Highway signification through tourism marginalia and travelogues from the 1950s and 60s, my dissertation more broadly analyzes Anglo-Canadian road fiction according to three periods of American-Canadian relations: the economic nationalism period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the free-trade era beginning in the 1980s, and the era of the Anthropocene. Regarding the chapter on Canada’s period of economic nationalism, for instance, I evaluate three texts—Glenn Gould’s short story and radio documentary “The Search for Pet Clark” (1967); Don Shebib’s breakout film Goin’ Down the Road (1970); and Roy Kiyooka’s epistolary poetic volume Transcanada Letters (1975)—and the way they use the national highway to realize the failures of Canada’s post-WWII Fordist reconstruction vision. Using the mise-en-abyme structure, these texts frame central narratives with a Trans-Canada Highway trip to simultaneously probe economic and cultural Americanization and recast nationalist potential. This dissertation’s focus, then, is on tracing the arrival of different forms of the Anglo-Canadian road narrative and the way these forms alternatively aestheticize evolving Canadian-American relations. “Open Border, Open Road” questions how Canadians, within an Anglo-nationalist context, repeatedly came to see their country anew amid shifting American-Canadian relations in the post-WWII period, and argues for the road narrative as a crucial site for indexing these shifts.

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