Colloque

The Accidental American: A Canadian Law Professor's Journey “Home”

Bernard Hibbitts

Membre a labase

Bernard Hibbitts

Résumé de la communication

Not all Canadian expatriates in the United States are “American dreamers” – some have found themselves in the US largely by accident, in locations they never anticipated. This paper focuses on my own experiences as a Canadian law professor thrust into mainstream American legal academia in the US heartland in the late 1980s, with little warning and virtually no contact with Canadian peers. It explores the stages of my adaptation to these circumstances over 20 years, going from being a “stranger in a strange land” to the edge of assimilation, only to be drawn back to my Canadian roots in mid-career. It looks at how and why connections with “home” waxed, waned, and then waxed again, exploring the factors that encouraged those transitions, ranging from happenstances of family and trends in American legal education to the growth of the Internet and policy decisions made by the Canadian government. At the end it concludes that for one Canadian expatriate it’s truly said that “you can’t go home again.” My recent rendezvous with Canada suggests that I and others who left decades ago are to an extent now strangers in our own land - Hartzian “fragments” of an earlier Canada that no longer exists. It may be that my new “home” is neither Canada nor the United States, but the metaphysical borderland, the abstract space between the two countries that I now see I was actually brought up in, rendering problematic the traditional notion of having ever been “Canadian” in the first place.

Résumé du colloque

Jack Jedwab et Bruno Ramirez, deux historiens réputés, spécialistes des migrations canado-américaines, seront réunis dans un même panel traitant de l'évolution récente de ces migrations.