Acadiens and Cajuns.Indb

canadiana oenipontana 9 Ursula Mathis-Moser, Günter Bischof (dirs.) Acadians and Cajuns. The Politics and Culture of French Minorities in North America Acadiens et Cajuns. Politique et culture de minorités francophones en Amérique du Nord innsbruck university press SERIES canadiana oenipontana 9 iup • innsbruck university press © innsbruck university press, 2009 Universität Innsbruck, Vizerektorat für Forschung 1. Auflage Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Umschlag: Gregor Sailer Umschlagmotiv: Herménégilde Chiasson, “Evangeline Beach, an American Tragedy, peinture no. 3“ Satz: Palli & Palli OEG, Innsbruck Produktion: Fred Steiner, Rinn www.uibk.ac.at/iup ISBN 978-3-902571-93-9 Ursula Mathis-Moser, Günter Bischof (dirs.) Acadians and Cajuns. The Politics and Culture of French Minorities in North America Acadiens et Cajuns. Politique et culture de minorités francophones en Amérique du Nord Contents — Table des matières Introduction Avant-propos ....................................................................................................... 7 Ursula Mathis-Moser – Günter Bischof des matières Table — By Way of an Introduction En guise d’introduction ................................................................................... 23 Contents Herménégilde Chiasson Beatitudes – BéatitudeS ................................................................................................. 23 Maurice Basque, Université de Moncton Acadiens, Cadiens et Cajuns: identités communes ou distinctes? ............................ 27 History and Politics Histoire et politique .......................................................................................... 35 Herménégilde Chiasson Beatitudes – BéatitudeS ................................................................................................. 35 Ursula Lehmkuhl, Free University of Berlin Acadia: A History of Cultural Encounter and Cultural Transfer ................................... 39 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina Memory and Acadian Identity, 1920–1960: Susan Evangeline Walker Anding, Dudley LeBlanc, and Louise Olivier, or the Pursuit of Authenticity ........................................................ 55 Charles D. Hadley, University of New Orleans Cajun Politics in Louisiana: Laissez les bons temps rouler ........................................ 71 Language and Literature Langue et littérature ......................................................................................... 87 Herménégilde Chiasson Beatitudes – BéatitudeS ................................................................................................. 87 Thomas A. Klingler, Tulane University How Much Acadian is There in Cajun? ....................................................................... 91 Table des matières Table — Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, Université de Regensburg La diaspora acadienne dans une perspective linguistique ......................................... 107 Raoul Boudreau, Université de Moncton Présence / absence de la Louisiane en littérature acadienne contemporaine ........... 125 Contents François Paré, University of Waterloo Michel Roy’s Lost Acadia and the Continental Paradigm ........................................... 139 Popular Culture: Cuisine and Music Culture populaire: cuisine et musique .................................................... 151 Herménégilde Chiasson Beatitudes – BéatitudeS ................................................................................................. 151 John Laudun, University of Louisiana Gumbo This: The State of a Dish ............................................................................... 155 Jeanette Gallant, University of Oxford The Changing Face of Acadian Folk Song ................................................................. 169 Ronald Labelle, Université de Moncton La chanson traditionnelle dans l’Acadie contemporaine ............................................ 183 Contributors Auteurs ................................................................................................................... 193 Herménégilde Chiasson, Evangeline Beach, An American Tragedy 5 6 Introduction – Avant-propos The Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Innsbruck and CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans, supported by the International Association of Acadian Studies and the Institute of Acadian Studies of the University of Moncton, Avant-propos jointly organized the symposium “Acadians and Cajuns. The Politics and Culture – of French Minorities in North America” that was held in Innsbruck, Austria, on September 6 and 7, 2007. This symposium on the Acadians of eastern Maritime Canada and the Cajuns of southern Louisiana fi t well into the long tradition of exchanges across the Atlantic, which form part of the partnership agenda be- tween the University of Innsbruck and the University of New Orleans, starting in February 1982 with a fi rst international conference on federalism. The lively Introduction scholarly meeting of September 2007, under the auspices of Lieutenant Governor Herménégilde Chiasson from New Brunswick, accomplished the remarkable task of questioning some of the old mythologies about Cajuns and Acadians. On neu- tral Austrian terrain, the entire proceedings were conducted in English or French, whatever the speaker’s preference, and the same holds true for the proceedings of the symposium published in this volume. French émigrés to Acadie, the Maritime provinces of today’s Canada, which were part of France’s burgeoning North American empire in the early 17th century, are the starting point of our journey through the comparative history of two North Ameri- can French speaking minorities. These French émigrés, of course, were part of a much larger transatlantic migration from Europe to the Americas, which Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn has appropriately called “the peopling of America”.1 In the 17th and 18th centuries the European powers France and Great Britain vied for a global hegemonic position in the world.2 As a result of that interminable struggle to improve their imperial positions in North America, the Protestant British prevailed in the mid-18th century and displaced the Catholic inhabitants of the French maritime provinces. Yale historian John Mack Faragher has recently called this expulsion, in 20th-century diction, an “ethnic cleansing”, with the ugly subtext of torture, murder, rape, land theft, and cultural homogenization as part of that process.3 The “Cajuns” of South Louisiana were part of the diaspora of the displaced Acadians. 1 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. 2 David B. Abernathy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1414- 1980, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 2000. 3 John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland, New York, W.W. Norton, 2005. 7 The starting point of the present volume is Canadian historian Maurice Basque’s (University of Moncton) critical refl ection on the terms “Acadiens”, “Cadiens”, and “Cajuns”, which for most people are interchangeable words and supposed to describe the same identities with regional variations depending on the Acadian or Louisiana context. Recent scholarship, however, has shed a new light on these identities and proposes that today’s Acadian identity found in the Atlantic Pro- vinces of Canada is very different from the Cadien and Cajun identities that are Avant-propos – intimately linked to the history of Louisiana. By way of an introduction M. Basque presents the two dominant visions of Acadian identity: the genealogical, “virtual” one and the one based on today’s realities and contemporary Acadian society. He discusses recent studies that deal with these complexities and focus on the use of French as a possible marker of the three identities; however, M. Basque also makes the point that popular discourse is far from integrating these scholarly insights. Introduction The chapter “History and Politics” opens with historical perspectives. In her en- deavour to adequately describe what Benedict Anderson4 has called “an imagined community”, German historian Ursula Lehmkuhl (John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies, Free University of Berlin) combines three approaches to Acadian history: The fi rst one subdivides Acadian history into the time before deportation and after, stressing how the entire trajectory of Acadian history and memory is defi ned by the traumatic expulsion of the French settlers from Acadie in 1755. The second approach takes the dominant metropolitan power as a criterion of subdivision whereas the third one, in line with Naomi Griffi ths, focuses on such critical time-space constellations as the 1680s, the 1730s, 1748–55, or 1755– 84. U. Lehmkuhl concludes by discussing Acadian history in the light of cultural encounters, of cultural transfer and transculturality, and of colonial governance, which induced Acadians to develop a self-help system based on extended family networks. In so doing she takes up contemporary concepts of how to describe cultures in contact and makes a remarkable contribution to a new interpretation of Acadian history. With Fitzhugh Brundage’s (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) contribution the reader’s attention is drawn to Louisiana and the construction of “authenticity”. F. Brundage concentrates on three champions of the Cajun identity revival in Louisiana who “exploited”

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