Voices in search of a conversation: An unfinished project

Interdisciplinary Canadian Studies emerged in two distinct phases. The firs t was launched with the birth of the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carle ton University in 1957, and provided a bridge from the age of the metanarra tive and the canon to phase two, originating with the first issue of the Jo urnal of Canadian Studies in 1966, and encountering the discourses of the p ostmodern and the post-colonial. As we begin the new millennium the second phase is beginning to give way to a third. This paper investigates phase tw o, particularly the interval 1966 to 1975. During these years the idea of d iversity was institutionalized as a resistance to the metanarrative. The period is characterized by the liberation of a multiplicity of voices. Throughout its brief life, interdisciplinary Canadian Studies has consisten tly favoured the collaboration of the disciplines in a spirit of widening i ntellectual boundaries. In phase two it proved to be uncomfortable with the fragmentation of imported critical theory, in its very nature conflicted b y an intellectual commitment to the nation state and to notions of communit y and citizenship. Throughout phase two there has been a tension between in terdisciplinarity and theory. Phase three might, it is suggested be charact erized by a renewed collaboration of the disciplines, and a conversation of the voices, in defence of the relationship that makes them possible.