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.
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