North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. Continental Divides is the first book to study the patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Rachel Adams considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. She investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity? In this engaging analysis, Adams charts the lengthy and often unrecognized traditions of neighborly exchange, both hostile and amicable, that have left an imprint on North America’s varied cultures.

The book calls for a new iconography of region that unseats New England's status as cultural center of the United States and originary metaphor for national identity. No single territorial or political axis can adequately describe the complex regional relationships that comprise the nation, Goldman argues. The essays in this volume juxtapose African-American, Mexican-American, and Anglo American fictions produced in the wake of both the Civil War and the U.S.-Mexican War, contiguous national conflicts that remain segregated in critical practice. At once comparative and intertextual, the readings in this study redefine western literature in its relation to other U.S. regional literary formations. Goldman's arguments question critical sectionalism as extensively as they do regional divisions, by blurring generic distinctions, by reading across literary periods, and by juxtaposing writers who explore the same set of social issues during the same historical moment, but who are conventionally located in separate literary traditions: sentimental literature, the African American novel, literary modernism, early Mexican fiction.

Without recourse to mythology or hyperbole, Gordon demonstrates that the historical and philosophical ramifications of Davos '29 are even more profound than previously understood. The publication of Continental Divide signals a major event in the fields of modern history and Continental philosophy.---John P. McCormick, University of Chicago --

Since Mexico-U.S. migration represents the largest sustained migratory flow between two nations worldwide, much of the theoretical and empirical work on migration has focused on this single case. In the last few decades, however, migration has emerged as a critical issue across all nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the region seeing its position changed from a net migrant-receiving region to one that now stands as one of the foremost sending areas of the world. In this latest volume of the ANNALS, leading migration scholars seek to redress the imbalance offered when only studying a single case with the first systematic assessment of Latin American migration patterns using ongoing research on the Mexican case as a basis for comparison. Each chapter examines specific propositions or findings derived from the Mexican case that have not yet been tested for other Latin American or Caribbean nations. Using a common framework of data, methods, and theories, they offer a new perspective on the causes and consequences of migration in the Western Hemisphere.

Go West, Young Man. Isn't that the advice every east coast boy has considered at least once in his life? At nineteen, almost twenty, Ron Bancroft thinks those words sound pretty good. Newly out as transgender, Ron finds himself adrift: kicked out by his family, jilted by his girlfriend, unable to afford to return to college in the fall. So he heads out to Wyoming for a new start, a chance to prove that—even though he was raised as a girl, even though everyone in Boston thinks of him as transgender—he can live as a man. A real man. In Wyoming, he finds what he was looking for: rugged terrain, wranglers, a clean slate. He also stumbles into a world more dangerous than he imagined, one of bigotry and violence. And he falls for an intriguing young woman, who seems as interested in him as he is in her. Thus begins Ron's true adventure, a search not for the right place in America, but the right place within himself to find truth, happiness, and a sense of belonging.

Artfully blending Scott Bischke and his wife Katie Gibson's agonizing struggle against Kate's advanced, recurrent, "terminal" cancer, this is the story of their three month, 800+ mile hike along the Continental Divide Trail across Montana. Numerous themes and parallels weave through the book: several encounters with grizzly bears, for example, provide an avenue for metaphorical comparisons between the fear of grizzlies and the fear of cancer. Similarly, Kate's ability to persevere through the toils of a long-distance hike provides a constant parallel to her ability to persevere against cancer. Other themes include the importance of a dogged spirit in battling cancer and the importance of wild country in revitalizing the soul.

An account of the authors' walk across the Great Divide from Mexico to the Canadian border describes the people, the pertinent political and environmental issues, the history of the areas, and other important topics

While we may talk back to the empire, we can’t talk to each other. Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa is the great ocean continent. While it is common to understand the ocean as something that divides land, for those Indigenous to the Pacific or the Moana, it was traditionally a connector and an ancestor. Imperialism in the Moana, however, created false divides between islands and separated their peoples. In this BWB Text, Lana Lopesi argues that globalising technologies and the adaptability of Moana peoples are now turning the ocean back into the unifying continent that it once was.