“A Dark Outlook for the Future”: Black Liberation and the Reconstructions of Cajun Memory in Louisiana

Cajuns are a unique group of white southerners. Their presence in Louisiana can be traced back to the event of the Acadian deportation, in the late eighteenth century, when French settlers were forcibly expelled from the British colony of Nova Scotia (formerly French Acadia). Memories of this exile loom large in the historical consciousness of present-day Cajuns, who identify as the descendants of displaced Acadians. They animate a long-standing quest for public recognition and redress, which now receives the support of state and local governments in a region officially designated as “Acadiana.” Yet narratives of the past did not spring fully formed out of the lived experiences of eighteenth-century settlers. The formation of Cajun memory has its own history and, one might say, a distinctive rhythm. This talk juxtaposes two great moments of memory production, one just after the Civil War and the other during the Civil Rights movement, to bring into focus the forces that shaped modern representations of Cajun history. In both cases, people of Acadian descent developed renewed concerns for their “ethnic” roots just as the meaning of “race” itself was redefined. Key episodes of Black liberation, from the abolition of slavery to the demise of Jim Crow, pushed these white southerners to remember their unique past in creative and sometimes fanciful ways. A historical ethnography of Cajun memory can thus shed light on the formation of whiteness in the US South.

Xavier Robillard-Martel is a historical anthropologist whose work focuses on the US South and the legacies of French colonialism in North America. His research draws on comparative studies of racial formation and historical memory to explore regionally or ethnically specific expressions of whiteness. His doctoral project has combined ethnographic and archival research methods to explain the transformations of Cajun identity in Louisiana. His writing has been published in journals like Critique of Anthropology and Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Cornell University, he also holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in anthropology from the Université de Montréal. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.