Essays on Current Issues in Cajun and Creole Studies

Writings about Cajuns & Creoles.

The below four essays of mine address current issues in Cajun and Creole studies. 

Given my training as a historian (though one familiar with folkloric and sociological methods — my Ph.D. minor field, for example, being Rural Sociology of Minorities), I wrote these articles largely from a historical perspective, as opposed to, say, an anthropological or linguistic perspective.

Yet, as I preface each essay, I wrote these works not only as a historian, but as someone who identifies as both a Cajun and a Creole. As I note in one of these essays, “[M]any of my ancestors were Creoles of French heritage. My own family tree abounds with tell-tale Creole surnames: de la Morandière, Soileau, de la Pointe, Fuselier de la Claire, Brignac, Bordelon, de Livaudais, and others. . . . As such, I could, if I chose to do so (and sometimes I do), identify as Creole — doubly so because Cajuns themselves are to begin with a kind of Creole.”

It is my hope these essays will somehow, in their own small way, assist the field of Cajun and Creole studies by engaging in, and spurring on, the marketplace of competing ideas — which is, after all, how scholarship works or ought to work.

I trust those with whom I express disagreement will accept this critique in the collegial spirit it is intended.

The four essays, in no particular order, are: 

❧ Of Cajuns and Creoles: A Brief Historical Analysis 

❧ Born of “Elite” White Reactionism?: Assessing Claims about the Rise of Cajun Ethnicity

❧ Notes on the Birth of Cajun Ethnic Identity 

❧ Thoughts on Cajuns and “Whiteness”