Introduction

Introduction Jerry Bannister (bio) THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF ACADIENSIS COMES AT A WATERSHED moment in Canadian history. As we endure social crises and an ongoing pandemic, historians have grappled with how to respond to the horrific legacies of settler colonialism. In many respects, the statement on genocide issued by the Council of the Canadian Historical Association in July captures where we are as a country and a profession in 2021.1 As we face a reckoning over the tragedies of colonialism, the anniversary of Acadiensis offers us an opportunity to reflect on changes and continuities over the past generation. Like any anniversary, this raises old questions in new contexts: how is the history of the Atlantic region similar to broader national and international trends, and how it is distinctive? The first question dominated regional scholarship since the turn of the 21st century. If there has been a single metanarrative over the past generation, it has been fitting Atlantic Canada within Atlantic world, imperial, and global frameworks. As the wonderful thematic essays in this forum illustrate in different ways, this process highlighted three concepts: intersectionality, transnationalism, and digitization. Intersectionality deepened our understanding of the regional dimensions of class, gender, and ethnicity.2 Drawing on women's history, scholars have placed gender in its varied social, cultural, and environmental contexts. Scholars of racism and enslavement, led by Amani Whitfield, forged a new field that transformed our view of the Atlantic region before and after the arrival of the Black Loyalists.3 Digitization [End Page 11] facilitated this process by expanding not only the range of available primary sources but also the means through which scholarship is publicly disseminated and debated. New scholarly movements and initiatives, such as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), brought social media into mainstream regional scholarship and applied interdisciplinary research methods. With its social media initiatives, particularly its blog, Acadiensis itself helped to change how we discuss our research and engage with current events. As regional historians embraced intersectionality and digitization, they drew heavily on global and transnational perspectives. The pressing question in the early 2000s was, as the exchange in Acadiensis between John Reid and Luca Codignola put it, how wide our ocean could be.4 Led by large American and British universities, Atlantic world historians produced dozens of influential books on topics that crisscrossed the British Isles, Colonial America, and the Caribbean. They offered the promise of an inclusive account of the diverse peoples and cultures of the Atlantic rim. Atlantic and global historians have shared three common traits: they are oriented outwards towards the sea, rather than inwards towards the continent; they view the Atlantic Ocean as a highway that linked peoples together, rather than a barrier that kept them apart; and they focus on events, places, and movements marked by relatively dense populations, dominant empires, or large economies. Despite disagreements within the field, Atlanticists have generally agreed on the imperative to transcend region and locality. While globalization remains contentious as a geopolitical phenomenon, from 2000 it swept regional scholarship as an analytical framework. Evidence of this can be seen today across Canadian universities – from trends in undergraduate curricula, faculty hiring, to student recruitment and funding policies – and internationalization remains, despite Covid-19, the default plan for university leadership across Atlantic Canada. This trend brought mixed results. Opportunities for expanding our scholarly perspectives brought risks of homogenizing regional distinctiveness to fit American or British models. Promises of genuine transnational conversations too often resulted in demographically smaller regions having a marginalized voice. Whereas the Acadiensis generation battled distortions and biases emanating from central Canada, over the past 20 years regional [End Page 12] historians faced pressures to conform to the dominant views of American and British scholars for whom Atlantic Canada is relevant insofar as it played a peripheral part in the larger drama of revolution and imperialism. Despite promises of decentering narratives, the reality is that Atlantic Canada remained in the 2000s as marginalized intellectually as it had been in the 1970s as university history departments across North America embraced transnational trends in staffing and curricula. However, as Acadiensis marks its golden anniversary, there are clear signs of a new emergent era in...

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