Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions E-Book

Brian Costelle

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Ina Fandrich, John laFleur II

Louisiana's French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions

Facts vs Fiction Before and Since Cajunization

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Introduction by Dr Ina Fandrich

Over the last four decades, a politically motivated, mass-marketed caricature of Louisiana's Francophone people, language and culture was created which had no regard or no precise knowledge of Louisiana's cultural, ethnic or linguistic diversity and history. As a prelude to a new series referred to as “Our People: The Forgotten French Creoles of Louisiana’s French Triangle…” "Louisiana's French CREOLE Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Facts vs. Fiction, Before and Since Cajunization" seeks to repair this distortion by presenting a historically valid, culinary and linguistic study of the diverse cultures which created the rich, cultural embroidery known as our Louisiana Creole food menu and our enchanting old world French dialects! (Yes, there is more than one French dialect in "la Louisiane!) The authors, John La Fleur II and Brian Costello, are both Louisiana French and Creole native-speakers and Creole cultural scholars, who along with Dr. Fandrich certainly bring color and facts together which will entertain, educate and inform our readers. We seek to educate, enlighten and to tell the truth about Louisiana’s earliest multi-cultural ethnicities who are the creators of her unique Creole foods, language(s), culture and people; and which people have a right to claim and honor their own unique cultural, linguistic and ethnic history and heritage over any socially or politically fabricated labels. Documented through beautiful vintage and contemporary photography, by award-winning, Louisiana native, Norris Fontenot, the reader gets to "see the history," through the lives of the historic characters, material culture, food and architecture; an epic story which spans almost three centuries, and ties Louisiana’s earliest families to a much older and varied culture, far beyond the shores of Louisiana to those of the Caribbean French Antilles to Africa, Spain and France, and leading as far away as to the Indian Ocean’s Creole corner of Réunion and Mauritius and ultimately, entailing Italian and Irish influences as well. The historical, linguistic, culinary and genealogical information provides a compelling and sometimes, humorous family portrait of the inter-connectivity of all varieties of Louisiana's almost forgotten Creole people of the "French Triangle" and the historical primacy of their unique international, inter-racial and inter-cultural world, which lead us far beyond the limited shores of Acadian Canada. The aim of this book, therefore, is to demonstrate the primacy and diversity of the much older Louisiana native or Creole ethnicities in shaping both the languages and culinary heritage of Louisiana, including that of the Acadian/Cajuns whose, original culture remains foreign and unknown to Louisiana; but, which people nonetheless, fully assimilated Louisiana’s very old Creole culture, even as “Cajun” –used apart from its Acadian historical and ethnic meaning-is undeniably a sociological, political and cultural manifestation evolved during Louisiana’s turbulent racial past.