Publications
Please see my Academia.edu page for selected essay downloads
Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America's Frontier Imagination (2017/2019)
American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that correlates with the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American culture.
This book focuses on the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America, specifically the ways in which they have been imaged and imagined since their formation in the 19th century and how tropes of visuality are central to their production and meaning. Rodney links ongoing discussions in political geography and visual culture in new ways to demonstrate how contemporary American borders exhibit security as a display strategy that is resisted and undermined through a variety of cultural practices.
Reviewed by Will Straw, Professor of Urban Media Studies Department of Art History and Communications Studies McGill University, https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/racar/2018-v43-n1-racar03923/1050836ar.pdf
Sensing Borders: Ressentir les Frontières, Intermédialités, no. 34, 2019
Co-edited with Karen Engle and Michael Darroch
This issue of Intermédialités/Intermediality aims to reconsider the limits and possibilities of border as metaphor in light of the shifting theoretical insights offered by the European border experiment (from the 1993 Schengen agreement to Brexit), the continual and/or resurgent instability of border spaces in authoritarian contexts and war zones, as well as hemispheric perspectives from across the Americas. The range of sites and practices discussed in this issue reveals the ubiquitous nature of bordering practices that have been developed through colonial histories, refined through nation-states, and perfected in surveillance cultures. The essays and artists’ projects collected extend and multiply the sites of borders and bordering practices, pulling them away from their immediate geopolitical roles by probing how and where they are felt and sensed.
"Sight and Site on the Line: The Cultural Imaginary of Borderlands in North America"
In Borders, Culture and Globalization: A Canadian Perspective, University of Ottawa Press, 2021
Edited by Victor Konrad and Melissa Kelly
Thischapter considers contemporary art and media projects located in North Americanborder regions in the last decade and their role as critical practices andforms of translocal resistance against the tide of separation andsecuritization that has governedborders since 2001. I aim to contextualize twocollaborative transborder “research-creation” projects that I have beeninvolved with since 2010 and the questions they raise in relation to culturalborderlands between Canada and the United States. I am interested incomparative borderlands perspectives and the role that borderlands can have asheterogeneous regions that offer the possibility for navigating politicalchange through activating an understanding of place outside of national settlercultures or histories. In mapping the “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004) ofborders, many recent art and media practices locate how borderlands produceforms of alterity while also revealing new struggles, patterns of belonging, or“communities of sense” that stand apart from national concerns.