Editorial: “Sharing the Continent”

Abstract

This somewhat unusual copublished number of The American Review of Canadian Studies and the Canadian Review of American Studies had its beginnings at the 1993 meeting of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. There, several of us, including an editor from each journal, Victor Konrad of the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the United States, and Richard Kaplan, then Cultural Attache at the United States Embassy in Ottawa, found ourselves in a general, broad-based discussion of various means of academic connection across the Canada-U.S. border. Someone observed in the midst of this that these two journals, ARCS and CRevAS, in effect mirror one another, both in our reversed titles and, far more importantly, in our shared concerns. Sometime after, as the two of us took up the idea and began planning, numerous other commonalities, less apparent but equally connective, became evident. Each editor, friends and colleagues for some time, is also something of a mirror of the others, one an American specializing in Canada in literature and culture, the second a Canadian historian specializing in U.S. diplomatic history with the Americas, and the third a Scot living in Canada and specializing in the literature of the American West. Each of us, moreover, has made an especial focus on Canada-U.S. matters, treating the ebb and flow of time, personas, culture, and politics across the border. More than this, though, the present editor of ARCS had his first editorial appointment as Managing Editor of CRevAS when it was published at the University of Manitoba under the joint editorship of John J. Teunissen and Bruce C. Daniels. To cap the commonalities off, we discovered as we got close to production that, ironically, the two journals are at literally the same moment in their publishing lives--Volume 26, Number 3. This coincidence is suggestive of many things, most of them indicative of the various fields that contribute to North American Studies, whether focused on Canada, the United States, or Mexico and Latin America, and of interdisciplinary studies more generally. That Canadian Studies in the United States and American Studies in Canada were sufficiently established to launch interdisciplinary journals at the same moment suggests that 1970 was a key instant in both academic communities. Without question, the need for outlets for interdisciplinary scholarship--works that crossed disciplinary borders--was being felt after the previous decade of university expansion. But the turmoil wrought by Vietnam, by the rise of the FLQ, and, more generally, by the social ferment which characterized North America at that time--including the rise of nationalism exemplified by Expo '67--played a contextual role, and emerging issues between Canada and the U.S.--the Auto Pact, Vietnam, and Canadian nationalism--demanded both academic attention and more considered analysis. From the start, both ARCS and CRevAS shared a mandate and, as such, have competed for manuscripts, especially those that dealt with comparative Canada-U.S. issues. What D.W. Meinig has called the intense complexities of the Canada-U.S. border regions are intense, and they are complex; thus, the work of those scholars able to deal with both sides of an intellectual question has been fervently sought. …