Inhabited spaces and distances: Acadian and Cajun Circulations

[Mireille McLaughlin]

Inhabited spaces and distances:Acadian and Cajun circulations

When we heard the upcoming meeting of the AAA was going to be held in New 
Orleans, Hubert Noël and I immediately knew we wanted to present a panel on 
the links, or lack thereof, between Acadian and Cajun identities.  These two 
categorizations are linked by the historical deportation of Acadians in 1755, 
where many of the deportees of the British military operation found refuge in 
Louisiana. The term Cajun itself is linked to the term Acadian: A-cajun. 

While world events, such as the Congrès mondial acadien, perpetuate the links 
between Acadians and Cajuns, these social categories have evolved in vastly 
differing social, economic and political contexts. As we reflected on the 
significance of these categories in a transnational and postcolonial world, our 
panel took a broader scope.  We wanted to know how Acadian and Cajun 
categories evolved not just in relation with each other, but in relation with the 
other groups with whom they shared spaces and resources. 

We’re proud to say that François Paré has accepted to begin the discussion. 
His  work on questions of literature, politics and postcolonialism is seminal in 
Canadian Francophone studies. He will be joined by young and established 
researchers who have studied the circulation of people, identities, ideologies, 
practices and products within Acadian and Cajun spaces. Annette Boudreau, 
who has done work on questions of power dynamics in minority context, will 
lead the discussion.
 
The panel will be held in Thursday the 18th in Studio 4 on the Second floor of 
the Mariott. Please read the panel abstract below for more detailed 
information and, as Acadian tourism commercials famously tout: “V’nez nous 
voir!”


Best,

Mireille McLaughlin
Département de sociologie et d'anthropologie
Université d'Ottawa

http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/dev/viewDetail.cfm?
itemtype=session&matchid=6387

From colonization to globalization, Acadian and Cajun narratives are 
interwoven with migrations and travel. The constitutive narratives of 
peripheral settler identities in North America are coming under challenge as 
global movements challenge the processes of categorization inherited from 
colonization. This is a double source of tension for linguistic minorities who 
straddle the divide between historical mobilizations as quasi-national or ethnic 
movements and the need to account for processes of inclusion and exclusion 
within and across their boundaries. 
François Paré developed the notion of inhabited distance to document the 
complexity of building francophone identity from peripheral locations (2003). 
We build on Paré’s concept by adding the notion of inhabited spaces: the 
complexity of building peripheral identities alongside, with and against other 
claims to identity, language and territory. The central role of circulation calls 
attention to the spaces of departure and the spaces of arrival of the people, 
languages, discourses and products migrating. These spaces of arrival and 
departure share the commonality of being inhabited sometimes by those 
identified as being part of the group, sometimes by those categorized as 
outside of it and always structured by local and global language ideologies. 

Inhabiting is mobilizing economic, symbolic, linguistic and political resources to 
construct boundaries between the Self and Others. Inhabiting is also 
constructing, domesticating and regulating space in ways that enable and 
constrain circulation, produce social struggles and create new subject 
positions and discourses. It is, as in Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, taking 
position and being positioned by the processes of inclusion and exclusion 
characteristic of any social space. 

Studies of Acadian and Cajun identities are ripe terrains for deconstructing 
territorializing, racializing and monolingualizing understandings of language in 
the reproduction(s) and transformations of identity on the global economy. We 
mobilize critical sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to understand the 
postcolonial and postnational discourses and practices of Acadian and Cajun 
identity. Each paper focuses on the role of language ideologies and linguistic 
practices in the (re)production of Acadian and Cajun public spaces in the new 
global landscape. François Paré introduces the panel by offering a critical 
analysis of discourses of politicization and depoliticization in contemporary 
Cajun and Acadian Festivals. Noël traces the role of language ideologies and 
cultural practices in the structuration of circulation for Acadian symbolic 
elements in the field of singer-songwriting. Other papers follow how the global 
circulation of individuals and resources towards Acadian spaces brings about 
either new discourses of identity (Keating), struggles for the valorization of 
linguistic capital within the market of English-French translation (LeBlanc) and 
tensions for newcomers as they position themselves in the Acadian linguistic 
landscape (Violette). Finally, Urbain follows the stakes surrounding linguistic 
categorization for peripheral linguistic minorities, as stakeholders strive to 
position Acadian and Cajun communities as either diverging speakers of 
French, or as necessitating integration into an imagined international French 
norm. These papers take up the notion of inhabited spaces and distances to 
address the tensions bolstered by circulation in Acadian and Cajun spaces 
through ethnographic enquiry and discursive analysis