Imagining Acadiana: Cajun Identity in Modern Louisiana

Jessica Dauterive

Dissertation Defense

April 19, 2024

Acadiana

1963: KATC coins "Acadiana"

1971: LA Legislature declares Acadiana an economic region

1973: LA Legislature adopts the Acadian flag for the region

Argument and Contributions

• New perspectives of Americanization in Cajun history
  • 1920s-1970s
     
• Power, profit, preservation
  • White ethnic group
  • Cajun culture industries
  • Middle out work
     
• Cajun community leaders took advantage of the slippage between a romantic and white Acadian identity and a historical and more ethnic Cajun identity to lay the foundation for a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural region to become Acadiana.

Scope and Structure

• Fifty year period, 1920s-1970s
   
• Responded to national contexts of political, social, and cultural change
   
• Dissertation in two acts: from Acadian to Cajun identity
   
• Focus local community leaders
  • Shifts from feminine to masculine regional identity and who shapes it

Mildred Dessens: Evangeline Tourism and the Roots of Acadian Memory

• Time period: 1925-1930
   
• Sources: Close reading of Mildred Dessens' scrapbook
   
• Argument: Mildred Dessens’ work as The Modern Evangeline provided the narrative foundation for the development of Acadiana by bringing Acadian myth and history to life, forever altering the identity of a region and its people through tourism.

Louise Olivier: From the Evangeline Myth to the Acadian Folk

• Time period: 1938-1955
   
• Sources: Organizational records​ of the Acadian Handicraft Project and Acadian Bicentennial Celebration
   
• Argument: Louise Olivier laid a new foundation for the emergence of Acadiana based on the living folk culture of the Acadian and Cajun past by moving the region’s identity from myth to history.

Catherine Blanchet: The Louisiana Folk Foundation and the Racial Politics of Acadian Identity

• Time period: 1964-1965
   
• Sources: Correspondence of the Louisiana Folk Foundation and Ralph Rinzler papers
   
• Argument: The work of the LFF, particularly secretary Catherine Blanchet, makes clear the power of Acadian music to defend a white, conservative regional identity.

Floyd Soileau: Recording Acadiana's Folk Music in the Region's Commercial Music Industry

• Time period: 1950s-1970s
   
• Sources: Oral histories, Flat Town catalog
   
• Argument: Floyd Soileau played a crucial role in developing the region’s sonic Cajun identity and demonstrates how local, vernacular music was given meaning through the marketplace.

Epilogue: Acadiana, (Re) Imagined

• Time period: 1970s
   
• Acadiana founded with cultural slogans and traditions
   
• Countermovements to Cajun-centric identity emerge
   
• Contest cultural amnesia about the fifty years before Acadiana that made the region possible and set up its central tensions and challenges.

Imagining Acadiana: Cajun Identity in Modern Louisiana

Jessica Dauterive

Dissertation Defense

April 19, 2024

Slides