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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.
Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History traces the four-hundred-year history of this distinct American ethnic group. While written in a format comprehensible to junior-high and high-school students, it will prove appealing and informative as well to adult readers seeking a one-volume exploration of these remarkable people and their predecessors. The narrative follows the Cajuns' early ancestors, the Acadians, from seventeenth-century France to Nova Scotia, where they flourished until British soldiers expelled them in a tragic event called Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval)—an episode regarded by many historians as an instance of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Up to one-half of the Acadian population died from disease, starvation, exposure, or outright violence in the expulsion. Nearly three thousand survivors journeyed through the thirteen American colonies to Spanish-controlled Louisiana. There they resettled, intermarried with members of the local population, and evolved into the Cajun people, who today number over a half-million. Since their arrival in Louisiana, the Cajuns have developed an unmistakable identity and a strong sense of ethnic pride. In recent decades they have contributed their exotic cuisine and accordion-and-fiddle dance music to American popular culture. Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History includes numerous images and over a dozen sidebars on topics ranging from Cajun music to Mardi Gras.
A study of unusual documentary resources that disclose the processes of cultural evolution that transformed the Acadians of early Louisiana into the Cajuns of today.
Long overdue, this volume is a retrospective on the artist most noted for theBlue Dog, covering his 40-year career.
"The Cajun culture of south Louisiana has got to be one of the most highly publicized, most often distorted subjects in the American media today. The manner in which some of the media have portrayed the Cajuns not only borders on slandering a people with a proud heritage, but also raises serious questions about the conscientiousness of a substantial segment of the American media. To read the articles in some of the travel magazines and metropolitan newspapers, you'd swear that all the Cajun people do is eat, drink and dance. You'd think that the Cajun country is an exotic land made up mostly of swanps and sleepy little towns with docile, unambitious people who don't care about much except the saturday night dance and their next can of beer. But nothing could be further from the truth!"--Page 4 of cover.
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.
A collection of twenty-six traditional Cajun tales, including animal stories, fairy tales, ghost stories, and humorous tales.
The Cajuns of Louisiana are a people descended from one of the earliest colonies of European North Americans. Their ancestors, the Acadians, established a French-speaking settlement around Canada's Bay of Fundy in 1604 -- several years before Jamestown. In 1755, their community was decimated in one of American history's most brutal and sordid episodes, known to the Cajuns as Le Grand Dérangement. English soldiers seized the inhabitants of entire towns, arbitrarily splitting up Acadian families and shipping them south. The Cajuns traces both the Acadian roots of these staunchly independent people and the exodus of their refugee descendants into the physically and politically challenging bayou country of colonial Louisiana.
This teeming compendium of tales assembles and classifies the abundant lore and storytelling prevalent in the French culture of southern Louisiana. This is the largest, most diverse, and best annotated collection of French-language tales ever published in the United States. Side by side are dual-language retellings—the Cajun French and its English translation—along with insightful commentaries. This volume reveals the long and lively heritage of the Louisiana folktale among French Creoles and Cajuns and shows how tale-telling in Louisiana through the years has remained vigorous and constantly changing. Some of the best storytellers of the present day are highlighted in biographical sketches and are identified by some of their best tales. Their repertory includes animal stories, magic stories, jokes, tall tales, Pascal (improvised) stories, and legendary tales—all of them colorful examples of Louisiana narrative at its best. Though greatly transformed since the French arrived on southern soil, the French oral tradition is alive and flourishing today. It is even more complex and varied than has been shown in previous studies, for revealed here are African influences as well as others that have been filtered from America's multicultural mainstream.
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.