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

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