Editorial: The Future of North America(n Studies)?

Abstract

American regional economic integration was already well advanced when the legislatures of Mexico, Canada, and the United States approved the American Free Trade Agreement. three national debates over NAFTA, however, alerted scholars and the informed public to the existence of what historian John Wirth calls an emerging trinational space. three countries are living, Wirth writes here, a hinge moment in human affairs, when the shift into a new era is palpable but dimly perceived (263). implications of American integration extend far beyond the economic significance of the removal of barriers to trade and investment: the creation of America implies broader and more profound political, social, and cultural consequences. is a logical site within the U.S. academy from which to study those consequences; who else in the United States, including even expatriate Canadians, knows the square root of squat about what's going on in the turbulence of contemporary Canada? Yet Studiers seem uneasy and uncomfortable with this opportunity, as if we feared that our modest but familiar area studies niche could not survive the challenge of constructing a new paradigm. Our apprehension about open intellectual borders echoes the anxiety with which so many Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans approached open economic borders. No one should imagine that negotiating new directions in area studies will be without risk, but our refusal to explore the implications of American regionalization would expose in the United States to the greater risk of irrelevance. preceding paragraph is, of course, naked self-justification for a plunge that Duke University has already taken. In 1989, Duke Canadianists began to cautiously cooperate with Duke Latin Americanists to scout the new American frontier. In two symposia on regional integration, held in September 1989 and June 1992, we consulted colleagues from Mexico, from Canada, and from other U.S. universities, to contemplate what a comprehensive agenda of research and teaching on the three nation-states of America might look like. After five years of nervous preparation, in 1994 Duke created an interdisciplinary program dedicated to the study of the American region. In January 1997, we inaugurated Duke's American Center with a forum on The Future of and symbolically proclaimed the existence of America, and that of the center, by adding the Mexican and the U.S. flags alongside the red and white Maple Leaf that we've long flown. Duke's decision to create a American program has caused excitement, unease, and confusion within and beyond the university. Getting both North American Studies and Canadian Studies on our Duke-approved-size sign in Duke-approved-size letters meant painting over Etudes canadiennes, an eradication which aroused anguished phone calls. But now that the Stars and Stripes flies alongside the Maple Leaf, Center administrator Janice Engelhardt is spared regular calls from the hyper-patriots who protested when we flew the flag alone, without Old Glory above it. As the birth announcements for American drifted across the campus and the continent, Duke Canadianists received kind telephone calls, e-mail, and sometimes even actual letters consoling us on our demise. To rephrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of at Duke are more than greatly exaggerated: they're completely erroneous. Instead, we've expanded our emphasis on Canada in its American context, a move similar to our creating at Duke in 1972, when Commonwealth Studies seemed no longer adequate to locate Canada in the world. More specifically, American supplements Studies; it in no way supplants it. In effect, Canada has annexed the continent, fulfilling Sir Wilfrid Laurier's prediction that the twentieth century would belong to Canada; it just took a little longer than Sir Wilfrid thought it would. …