7. Border Hypotheses: Speculations on Territory and Sovereignty in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour

Black British Columbian poet Wayde Compton's work has consistently returned to questions of border crossings, particularly those involving Black North Americans across the Canada-US border.Compton's poetry has focused on the Black Californian pioneers who came to British Columbia in the nineteenth century (in 49 th Parallel Psalm, 1999) and the Black Vancouver community located in Hogan's Alley (in Performance Bond, 2004), destroyed in 1970 as part of an urban renewal project.Compton's writing has both sought to write these forgotten histories back into visibility and to do so through an inventive poetics (discussed in Tanis MacDonald's treatment of Compton's "borderblur" in this volume), disrupting official histories through form as well as content.In The Outer Harbour: Stories (2014), his first collection of short fiction, Compton continues to invoke Black North American border crossing, but also implicitly reworks the ontology of the Canada-US border as a hauntology through his deployment of a speculative fiction in which spectrality features heavily.Whereas Compton's previous creative texts have tended to focus on history, The Outer Harbour projects a future in which a new island-named Pauline Johnson Island-appears in Vancouver's outer harbour and is subject to twenty-firstcentury methods of colonisation.Further, crowd-control holograms at a G25 protest and mysterious migrants who blink in and out of visibility populate this future Vancouver, the presence of the former enabled and the presence of the latter policed by the state.The Outer Harbour implicates borders in dispossession, primarily that of Indigenous peoples and migrants, as Compton imagines a struggle between the government, capital, and the land itself.Attention to the spectral as it appears in the collection and as it has been theorised emphasises the border as a site of both violence and haunting, at the same time as it produce inheritors: children of the border.As Jacques Derrida writes, "the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back." 1 If Compton's previous work has focused on uncovering Black North American-especially Black British Columbian-pasts, his engagement with spectrality in his speculative fiction enables us to read, project, and contest not only past injustices situated at or pushed to the nation-state's threshold but also the injustices of the future that Compton extrapolates from history and its legacies in the present.Situating the Canada-US border in a hemispheric context can offer useful comparisons of borders as haunted spaces, at the same time as Canada's own particular history and status cannot be conflated with those of countries even more subject to US political and economic dominance.Focusing on the Western hemisphere in general, but on Mexico's relationship to the United States in particular, Jesse Alemán argues that "'[i]n-ter' Americanism understands that the nations of the western hemisphere already contain within ('intra') their borders national others whose formative presence is subsequently buried (interred) but nonetheless felt and often expressed through gothic discourse." 2 For Alemán, Spanish colonialism is responsible for "hemispheric horrors": "difference maintains the borders across the Americas that distinguish one nation from the other, but sameness produces an inter-American gothic hemisphere." 3 In the context of this gothic hemisphere, the relationship between the United States and Mexico constitutes "a familial relation that

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.