The Fence and the Bridge: Geopolitics and Identity Along the Canada-US Border. Heather N. Nicol. Wilfrid Laurier Press.

In The Fence and The Bridge: Geopolitics and Identity Along the Canada-US Border, Heather N. Nicol examines the ideas, narratives and perceptions through which these two North American countries see the boundary that both unites and divides them. The book contributes to the analysis and discussion of the historical transformation of the concept of borders, and the ideas that surround their management and maintenance. Specifically, Nicol examines and prompts readers to question the basis of current political ideas on US and Canadian borders and their significant impact on the design and implementation of their corresponding domestic and foreign policies. Nicol is particularly interested in and concerned about the rise of a securitisation agenda in North America after the events of 9/11, and how this has influenced and impacted Canada’s perception and management of its own borders.

The innovative aspect of Nicol’s work lies in highlighting the centuries-long struggle that underpins current understandings of, and policies on, US-Canadian border management. Through the analysis and discussion of various historical episodes and cultural expressions surrounding bilateral agreements on US-Canadian borders, she demonstrates that behind the practical commitments and bilateral policies established between the US and Canada on border control lies a number of ideological differences that are unlikely to be reconciled in the near (or even distant) future. Nicol argues that such differences result from perpetual attempts by the US to impose its hegemonic practices, ideas and culture onto other countries, including Canada, and the unceasing determination of Canadians to construct and maintain an identity of their own, i.e. not ‘American’. It is in the context of this discussion that Nicol introduces the idea of ‘reflexive transnationalism’, to understand and explain the ways and means through which Canadian and US nationalisms have been constructed, divided and even connected by their shared borders.

Nicol uses representations, metaphors, stereotypes and other popular culture references, such as cartoons, to identify and illustrate US and Canadian attitudes towards their common borders. She argues that these images and texts are just as important as political speeches or diplomatic documents in constructing national and transnational identities and hence ideas embedded in current border security arrangements. Most of these images and texts convey a hegemonic ideological and economic discourse from the US, which is portrayed as a continental giant always adamant to pressure, manipulate and even absorb an always ‘resistant Canada’, focused on nation-building.

For instance, Nicol discusses the content of newspaper articles written in the 1900s, which are said to represent the then allegedly pacific-but-imperialist narrative underlying US policies towards Canada. While some stated that ‘Canada today owes its national existence to the forbearance and to the pacific policy of the United States’, others straightforwardly confirmed a ‘national motive’ for the US invasion of Canada, which could only benefit from the protection of Uncle Sam – whether it wants it or not (71,76). Nicol argues that the rise and dissemination of these attitudes and ideas among people and policymakers on both sides of the North American borders progressively transformed them from mere geographical pointers into sites of securitisation. Through the analysis of these and other texts, Nicol concludes that the US and Canadian borders have never been solely markers of the confines of different socio-political communities, but have been built on the rationale of protection against hostility – be it from one’s neighbour’s hegemony or the threats of a post-9/11 world.
Image Credit: US-Canada border near Glacier National Park (mtsrs)

While Nicol’s analysis is noteworthy, the book is strongly oriented towards a Canadian audience and presents a partial view of Canada as an ever-pacifist country which has been subjected to US dominance. Depicting Canada as the sole target of US hegemony in the American continent is not only inadequate, but also inaccurate. For instance, Nicol incorrectly describes the ‘Manifest Destiny’ as ‘the belief that [the United States of] America had a divine role to play as a ruler of the North American continent’. She argues that this belief led the US to regard its border with Canada as nothing but an inconvenient line which needed to be erased.

Such an assertion, however, not only inaccurately describes the Manifest Destiny, but also underrates its impact on other countries, which were substantially more affected by the prevalence of this belief in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than Canada has ever been. The Manifest Destiny was actually the belief that the United States were destined to expand throughout and dominate the whole American continent, i.e. not just Canada. Although Canada might have endured diplomatic and ideological pressure from the US resulting indirectly from the prevalence of the Manifest Destiny, Mexico, Cuba and the rest of Latin America endured direct military interventions, invasions and territorial losses directly resulting from this belief. By overlooking such substantial differences, Nicol compromises the potential use of the book in comparative political or international relations studies beyond Canada.

Moreover, the book’s significant emphasis on the emergence of a US-Canadian transnational identity, emerging from US hegemony and Canadian ‘nation-building’, inaccurately captures the expanding cooperation and ideological alignment that has occurred – either to the right or left – between various administrations, for instance those of President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau or Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President George W. Bush. The simplification of US and Canadian positions on border cooperation, cross-border trade and security initiatives seems to be aimed at reaffirming Canadian identity as ‘not American’, rather than analysing the basis of the unprecedented harmonisation of North American border, security and immigration policies.

In conclusion, Nicol makes a worthy contribution to US-Canadian border studies by providing a Canadian perspective on the increased hardening of what is ultimately an imaginary line dividing two imagined communities. Her work invites us to consider that ‘the meaning of borders is open to contestation’ (259), and that while their current management is a reflection of past popular understandings and nationalist ideas, these do not necessarily always mean the same thing to everyone. Indeed, a more cosmopolitan understanding of borders might emerge as peoples and countries uncouple the concepts of states and nations, through better and increased communication and understanding of each other’s societies. Nicol could increase her contribution to prompting such change by de-emphasising the differences between Captain Canuck and Uncle Sam, and examining in a more nuanced way the similarities between them.

Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience byMelanie Kirkpatrick, (Encounter Books, 2016)

Why Jefferson Said 'No' to Thanksgiving

There is a notable absence in the list of presidents who issued Thanksgiving proclamations: Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States famously declined to do so.

Jefferson had principled reasons for refusing to issue such a proclamation, which he explained in a letter to a New York City minister by the name of Samuel Miller, dated January 23, 1808. The Reverend Miller had written the president soliciting his views on whether his constitutional powers extended to naming a day of national Thanksgiving and prayer. Jefferson wrote in reply that he did “not consider [himself] authorized” to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation because the Constitution prohibits a president from “intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.” He quoted the First Amendment, which he described as “the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion.”


Naming a day of thanksgiving and prayer was a religious matter, he informed the minister, and therefore not an appropriate role for the federal government. “Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.”

Jefferson offered a second reason for his decision. Under the Constitution, he wrote, the authority to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation rightly belongs to the states, not the federal government. The Constitution reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the central government.Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states.”

Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives. Kate Crehan. Duke University Press. 2016.

 In Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives, Kate Crehan examines a number of core concepts in the work of theorist Antonio Gramsci – including common sense, the subaltern and the intellectual – that can help give precise insight into the emergence and persistence of social inequalities. Drawing on such case studies as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, this is a timely and profound account that has much to contribute to understandings of political change, writes Marcos González Hernando.





Amongst twentieth-century Marxist social theorists, Antonio Gramsci is perhaps the most important neither to have held a permanent academic post nor to have founded a ‘school’. An intellectually imposing man with a minute and frail figure, his imprisonment under Benito Mussolini, during which he wrote his famed notebooks, is one of the most memorable milestones of twentieth-century political thought. Under the most inauspicious circumstances, Gramsci produced an oeuvre that, while fragmentary, has greatly influenced the fields of political science, international relations, cultural studies and postcolonial theory amongst many others. Yet, while his concepts are widely known and employed, they are generally understood unsystematically and remain relatively marginal in the fields of sociology and anthropology.

Addressing this neglect is the aim of Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and its Narratives by Kate Crehan, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at City University New York (CUNY). It comes to challenge many common readings of this thinker, particularly concerning his thoughts on intellectuals and on processes of cultural and political change. Crehan has previously written on the applicability of Gramsci’s concepts to her discipline of anthropology and to the study of culture more generally. Gramsci’s Common Sense is another attempt to recast his ideas and render them applicable to the study of politics and to understanding how commonly held beliefs become so.

Discounting the introduction and conclusion, the volume is structured into two sections, each comprising three chapters. The first covers some of Gramsci’s core concepts – namely common sense, subalterns and intellectuals – which, taken together, allow a more precise grasp of how inequalities come about through his implicit theory on the production of social knowledge. Indeed, one of the book’s main features is its close reading of Gramsci’s sociology of knowledge, which explains Crehan’s criticism of previous deployments of Gramscian ideas. Two instances of this are worth mentioning here.
Image Credit: (thierry ehrmann CC BY 2.0)

The first example concerns his usage of ‘common sense’. Unlike its English counterpart, the Italian senso comune lacks positive connotations of reasonableness and even-mindedness. Senso comune simply means the disparate set of ideas and beliefs that are held commonly, yet vaguely, within a certain community. It is the result of institutions and producers of knowledge which, often in a sedimentary manner, promote a particular vision of the world. These ideas are, for Gramsci, affected by institutions and hierarchies that expound ‘good sense’ – a relatively coherent set of ideas about the world that can be disseminated ever more widely. Here, Gramsci is thinking especially of churches and political parties, and his ‘philosophy of praxis’ is but another example of ‘good sense’. Hence, whether senso comune is ‘commonsensical’ is beside the point – what is important is its quality of being common, which more often than not entails vagueness. This leads Crehan to be critical of the idea that democracies ought to be animated by a seemingly natural common sense, which she detects in Hannah Arendt’s writings. Quite the contrary, the very role of politics is to determine what becomes part of the senso comune, bereft of any ‘common sense’ to which one could return.

The second instance is her critique of romantic conceptions of intellectuals, exemplified by Edward Saïd’s reading of Gramsci. Against the idea that intellectuals should be autonomous – and hence that ‘organic intellectuals’ are basically hacks – Crehan understands Gramsci to be saying that intellectuals are necessarily embedded in social relationships through which knowledge is produced. All may think, but ‘not all […] have in society the function of intellectuals’ (27). Intellectuals are simply a subset tasked to reproduce a particular organisation of knowledge, which in time percolates into a senso comune. For Gramsci, the intellectual’s ‘organic’ character is linked to their social position rather than to self-interest or ‘bad faith’. His advocacy for cadres of organic intellectuals of the proletariat should thus be understood as an attempt to articulate a ‘good sense’ for the subaltern. Hence why Crehan reminds us that for Gramsci, incoherence is always negative – indeed, intellectual and political incoherence are commonly associated with subordinate positions.

The second section of Crehan’s book exemplifies these ideas through three case studies of intellectuals and social movements centred on inequality. The first of these covers the conditions under which Adam Smith in hindsight became the foremost organic intellectual of an ascending bourgeoisie, laying out the ideas of an emerging social class and its associated social order. The other two are more contemporary, both reflecting political dynamics that followed the 2008 financial crisis. The second chapter studies the rise of the Tea Party in the USA, while the third examines the travails of the Occupy Wall Street movement. While Crehan claims the former is an attempt to render ‘commonsensical’ a particular narrative of political crisis through media networks and intellectuals funded by corporate interests, the latter is an as-yet-unfinished attempt to articulate a good sense to challenge global financial capitalism.

Following Gramsci, one of Crehan’s central points in the empirical analysis of political movements is the importance of coherence. All of these examples are attempts to conquer the incoherent and vague through the formation of a coherent body of knowledge, and her analysis excels in highlighting these dynamics. However, there is one fundamental methodological issue this book does not solve. Towards the beginning of the book, Crehan claims Gramsci cannot but think in agonistic terms, citing him: ‘I don’t like to cast stones into the darkness; I want to feel a concrete interlocutor or adversary’ (7). An anthropology that thinks through oppositions goes against the grain of much of the history of the discipline, weary as it is of accusations of ethnocentrism. Without claiming that a Gramscian anthropology is impossible, this reviewer would have liked to read more on the matter.

Nevertheless, this point does not subtract from the fact that Crehan has produced a felicitous and profound intervention that could inform our understanding of both intellectual and political change. In 2016, as a new senso comune begins to develop in an age of ‘post-truth’ politics, Gramsci’s ideas are more timely than ever.