Entangling Migration History

Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund’s edited volume is an important addition to the study of North American borderlands, one that challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries that have shaped the field for the last several decades. Employing the concept of “entangled migrations,” the authors place the history of migration in conversation with transnational studies, comparative history, and borderlands history. In doing so, this book explores the contested meaning of the national line that united Canada and the United States on multiple scales—including local, national, and transnational levels. This volume includes established and emerging scholars, each of whom provides their own take on the meaning of entangled . José C. Moya offers a reevaluation of the colonization of Canada by situating it within broader patterns of European imperial expansion before the nineteenth century. Randy William Widdis provides a theoretical refiguring of migration across the U.S.-Canada divide. Employing the concept of “spatial grammar,” Widdis argues that using the “syntax of flows, corridors, gateways, hubs, and networks” can help us to understand the “ongoing evolution” of borderland spaces (p. 72). Bruno Ramirez draws our attention to an often understudied aspect of immigration history between the years 1915 and 1960: Mexican and Canadian migration to the United States.

Archaeology · Conversation · Epistemology · Genealogy · Immigration · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Transnationalism · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Canadian Identity and History · History · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Philosophy