How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture? Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture. Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

From antebellum times, Louisiana's unique multipartite society included a legal and social space for intermediary racial groups such as Acadians, Creoles, and Creoles of Color. In Becoming Cajun, Becoming American, Maria Hebert-Leiter explores how American writers have portrayed Acadian culture over the past 150 years. Combining a study of Acadian literary history with an examination of Acadian ethnic history in light of recent social theories, she offers insight into the Americanization process experienced by Acadians -- who over time came to be known as Cajuns -- during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hebert-Leiter examines the entire history of the Acadian, or Cajun, in American literature, beginning with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Evangeline and the writings of George Washington Cable, including his novel Bonaventure. The cultural complexity of Acadian and Creole identities led many writers to rely on stereotypes in Acadian characters, but as Hebert-Leiter shows, the ambiguity of Louisiana's class and racial divisions also allowed writers to address complex and controversial -- and sometimes taboo -- subjects. She emphasizes the fiction of Kate Chopin, whose short stories contain Acadian characters accepted as white Americans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Representations of the Acadian in literature reflect the Acadians' path towards assimilation, as they celebrated their differences while still adopting an all-American notion of self. In twentieth-century writing, Acadian figures came to be more often called Cajun, and increasingly outsiders perceived them not simply as exotic or mythic beings but as complex persons who fit into traditional American society while reflecting its cultural diversity. Hebert-Leiter explores this transition in Ernest Gaines's novel A Gathering of Old Men and James Lee Burke's detective novels featuring Dave Robicheaux. She also discusses the works of Ada Jack Carver, Elma Godchaux, Shirley Ann Grau, and other writers. From Longfellow through Tim Gautreaux, Acadian and Cajun literature captures the stages of this fascinating cultural dynamism, making it a pivotal part of any history of American ethnicity and of Cajun culture in particular. Concise and accessible, Becoming Cajun, Becoming American provides an excellent introduction to American Acadian and Cajun literature.

The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period, they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana. In the 1940s, when America entered World War II, so too did the isolated Cajuns. Cajun soldiers fought alongside troops from Brooklyn and Berkeley and absorbed aspects of new cultures. In the 1950s as rock 'n' roll and television crackled across Louisiana airwaves, Cajun music makers responded with their own distinct versions. In the 1960s, empowerment and liberation movements turned the South upside down. During the 1980s, as things Cajun became an absorbing national fad, “Cajun” became a kind of brand identity used for selling everything from swamp tours to boxed rice dinners. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new information age launched “Cyber-Cajuns” onto a worldwide web. All these forces have pushed and pulled at the fabric of Cajun life but have not destroyed it. A Cajun himself, the author of this book has an intense personal fascination in his people. By linking seemingly local events in the Cajuns' once isolated south Louisiana homeland to national and even global events, Bernard demonstrates that by the middle of the twentieth century the Cajuns for the first time in their ethnic story were engulfed in the currents of mainstream American life and yet continued to make outstandingly distinct contributions.

This insightful book is by far the broadest examination of traditional Cajun culture ever assembled. It goes beyond the stereotypes and surface treatment given to Cajuns by the popular media and examines the great variety of cultural elements alive in Cajun culture today--cooking, music, storytelling, architecture, arts and crafts, and festivals, as well as traditional occupations such as fishing, hunting, and trapping. It not only gives fascinating descriptions of elements in Cajun life that have been woven into the fabric of American history and folklore; it also explains how they came to be. Cajun Country reveals the historical background of the Cajun people, who migrated to Louisiana as exiles from their Canadian homeland, and it shows their folklife as a living and ongoing legacy that enriches America.

"This work serves as a model for compiling ethnohistories of other nonliterate peoples."--BOOK JACKET.