Louisiana's Creole French People: Our Language, Food & Culture

Louisiana's Creole French People: Our Language, Food & Culture
Author: John LaFleur II
Publisher: BookRix
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3736820550

In this provocative and poignant book, 500 Years Of Culture: Louisiana's Creole French & Metis People, Food, Language and Culture, I seek to provide my intelligent lay readers appropriate and useful scholarly resources which illustrate that a pre-Acadian culture of Canadian and North American Métis roots, to which was added European, African and later Spanish elements combined in both “Upper” and "Lower Louisiana" resulting in a multi-ethnic, but distinctly unique Louisiana Creole culture. Though reminiscent of other kindred Creole cultures and people of the world of the former French Empire, she remains unique. This unique historic, but forgotten culture existed prior to the arrival of the Acadians, and its cultural and linguistic traditions resulted in Louisiana’s historic “Creole” culture. This multi-ethnic culture's food ways, language and social traditions were hijacked and promoted as if it was something totally new in the 1970s and 80s, and then relabeled "Cajun" with no regard for the pre-existant and dominant history and sensibilities of the non-white ethnicities who were the true originators and creators of Louisiana's long indigenous and pre-Acadian culture! It is my hope to sufficiently demonstrate through this historical narrative, which is both passionate and humorous, how greed, ignorance and commerce joined hands in relabeling Louisiana's historic multi-ethnic Creole French and metis culture as if Acadian-Canada was the source of this remarkable and unusual culture which remains foreign to anything in Acadie! Informative and well-researched, I submit to you the reading and caring public, this revision which is also a much more readable, better edited and supplemented text. In this book, for example, a badly needed chapter on the cultural relationship between Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole culture is provided and will prove to be a great source of help in avoiding needless confusion of these two separate, but kindred cultures. Though small, this little book will no doubt, prove to be a powerhouse of jaw-dropping facts, as it is an uproariously humorous expose' of one of the most popular cultural forces in America and across the planet today! And, notwithstanding our best efforts, sometimes typographical errors and misses occur. For whatever imperfections of text remain, I take full responsibility as I also apologize to you dear reader.

The Cajuns

The Cajuns
Author: Shane K. Bernard
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2009-09-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496800923

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.

Dictionary of Louisiana French

Dictionary of Louisiana French
Author: Albert Valdman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 934
Release: 2010
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1604734043

The Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF) provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings. The new authoritative resource, the DLF not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The DLF features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane .

Speaking In Tongues, Louisiana's Creole French & "Cajun" Language Tell Their Own Story

Speaking In Tongues, Louisiana's Creole French &
Author: John laFleur II
Publisher: BookRix
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 3730911465

Adapted from a larger work,"Speaking In Tongues, Louisiana's Colonial French, Creole & Cajun Languages Tell Their Story" reveals Louisiana's remarkable Old World French & metis language traditions which continue to enchant America and scholars in all the world! But, along with the fame Cajunization has brought the State, historical distortion and misinformation fostered by mass-marketing and media conditioning myopia have suppressed and misrepresented Louisiana's historic French languages, cultural history and people as if uniquely Acadian in origin. But, Louisiana's diverse multi-ethnic French languages, cultural traditions and people existed long before the arrival of the Acadians, who themselves were to become its beneficiaries! Author-scholars John laFleur & Brian Costello, native-speakers respectively of Louisiana's Colonial Creole French & her sister tongue of Louisiana Afro-Creole with Dr. Ina Fandrich, provide a non-commercially scripted, first-time study of both the history and ethnological origins of Louisiana's diverse French-speaking peoples of the French Triangle and present the unvarnished results of their investigation, experience along with the evidence of modern and historical scholarship as seen through the franco and creolophonic traditions of Louisiana. A must read for all Louisiana cultural and linguistic afficionados!

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma
Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2005-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807130362

In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities. Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation. A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe. A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.

The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook
Author: Sara Roahen
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0820348589

Everybody has one in their collection. You know—one of those old, spiral- or plastic-tooth-bound cookbooks sold to support a high school marching band, a church, or the local chapter of the Junior League. These recipe collections reflect, with unimpeachable authenticity, the dishes that define communities: chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie. When the Southern Foodways Alliance began curating a cookbook, it was to these spiral-bound, sauce-splattered pages that they turned for their model. Including more than 170 tested recipes, this cookbook is a true reflection of southern foodways and the people, regardless of residence or birthplace, who claim this food as their own. Traditional and adapted, fancy and unapologetically plain, these recipes are powerful expressions of collective identity. There is something from—and something for—everyone. The recipes and the stories that accompany them came from academics, writers, catfish farmers, ham curers, attorneys, toqued chefs, and people who just like to cook—spiritual Southerners of myriad ethnicities, origins, and culinary skill levels. Edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge, written, collaboratively, by Sheri Castle, Timothy C. Davis, April McGreger, Angie Mosier, and Fred Sauceman, the book is divided into chapters that represent the region’s iconic foods: Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt, Put Up, and Cane. Therein you’ll find recipes for pimento cheese, country ham with redeye gravy, tomato pie, oyster stew, gumbo z’herbes, and apple stack cake. You’ll learn traditional ways of preserving green beans, and you’ll come to love refried black-eyed peas. Are you hungry yet?

Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions

Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions
Author: Ina Fandrich
Publisher: BookRix
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 3730909983

For the last four decades, Louisiana has promoted its 500 year old French Colonial Creole culture as "Cajun" implying that this culture had its origin in Acadian Canada. Nothing could be farthest from the truth! During the racially turbulent 1960's Jim Crow era when black Americans were literally struggling for their civil and human rights, the historic nomenclature for Louisiana's historic multi-ethnic CREOLE culture would change to a weird stereotyping of only WHITE French-speakers as "Cajun" and only BLACK French-speakers as "Creole" -regardless of the facts of history, genealogy, geography and genalogical reality. Today, the meaning of "Cajun" has once again changed into something which seeks to encompass a so-called "regional identity" which again, ignores its own past and historical meaning. What's really going on? In "Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Facts vs Fiction Before and Since Cajunization" authors John LaFleur II and Brian Costello, both life-long Louisiana French Colonial Creole speakers and cultural experts, along with Dr. Ina Fandrich of New Orleans, have decided to provide meaningful answers to questions long plaguing and confusing both the international and their local public. Their research, personal knowledge and answers are provided in this historic first which traces the pre-Acadian roots of Louisiana's historic multi-ethnic or Creole people, their foodways and their several languages still spoken in Louisiana today. The answers are often humorous, but poignantly factual and well-documented. This beautiful hardcover book is furnished in vintage black and white and contemporary full-color photography which grounds facts, places and people to a forgotten reality and culture which has been re-labeled and mass-marketed as "Cajun" for reasons both shameful and comical to educated and right-minded people alike.

Acadiana Table

Acadiana Table
Author: George Graham
Publisher:
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2016-10-15
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1558328637

Stuffed with 125 Creole and Cajun inspired dishes, Acadiana Table gets to the roots of everthing you need for Louisiana cooking and regional cuisine.

Creole New Orleans

Creole New Orleans
Author: Arnold R. Hirsch
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1992-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807117743

This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early history of Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joesph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creole through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the themes discerned by Logsdon and Bell from the turn of the century to the 1980s, examining the transformation of the city's racial politics. Collectively, these essays fill a major void in Louisiana history while making a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, ethnicity, and race relations. The book will serve as a cornerstone for future study of the history of New Orleans.