French America

de Dean R. Louder, Eric Waddell

This collection of essays represents the most comprehensive study to date of the concentrated populations of French origin that dot the North American continent from Quebec to Louisiana, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. The authors - geographers, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists - view the populations, which are today French-speaking to varying degrees, as part of a widely scattered and very diverse cultural community united by its historic language and its origins. Their essays, appearing together in the United States for the first time in this revised and updated translation of a volume first published in French, in the wake of the 1980 Quebec referendum on sovereignty-association, provide the only broad overview of the continent's peoples of francophone heritage in all their diversity, contradictions, and aspirations. Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to some of the largest of the francophone groups - particularly those in Quebec and Louisiana - this collection represents an impressive attempt to include many of the other centers of French language and culture in a single coherent historical and geographical perspective. The essays also consider the variety and similarities at these centers as minority islands within an aggressive and alien anglophonic sea. The volume's contributors offer a sophisticated analysis of the many aspects of the New World French experience, which began in the early seventeenth century and extends to the present day. Most of them address the history of a population, its interaction with the surrounding anglophone culture, and the measure and pattern of assimilation to it. They also record the development of ethnic self-consciousness within the groups they examine and assess the possibility of the cultural islands' survival as something apart in the age of the "global village." In describing the francophone presence and influence across the continent, the authors offer a new interpretation of the place of Quebec in America. Rather than viewing it as a remnant of another age and another system of values, they see Quebec as a powerful cultural hearth with a role far beyond its boundaries. This study promises to breathe new life into our understanding of the forces currently reshaping French America.