In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cajun language, which had been entirely oral for most of its history, began to emerge as a productive literary language. One of the prominent new authors of the period was Zachary Richard, also an important Cajun musician. One of his collections of poetry, Faire récolte (Les Éditions Perce-Neige, 1997), is translated here. This thesis also includes a translator's note that briefly explores the broad themes of the poems and the methods used in translating them.

This thesis examines the relationships between mothers and daughters against the background of education in early nineteenth-century France. This era was the first time that a large population of French girls was separated from their mothers. Because of their attendance at school, girls created an identity separate from that of the one that their mothers had helped them to create. By using George Sands autobiography Histoire de ma vie and Marceline Desbordes-Valmores poem Ondine à lecole, the process of distinguishing the daughter from the mother has been analyzed from both the mothers perspective and the daughters perspective. For Sand, who writes from the daughters perspective, her maternal figures (mother and grandmother) push her away from them so that she could get an education. As a result of being pushed away, she is forced to create her own identity. For Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, the opposite occurs. Writing from the mothers perspective, she becomes very protective of her daughter and seems threatened by Ondines success at school through which she creates a distinct identity away from Desbordes-Valmore. By studying these two works together, one can learn about the mother-daughter dynamics at work and the emotional hardships suffered by both mothers and daughters, as girls began school during this era. Both mother and daughter experienced a feeling of loss, and relationships were permanently changed as daughters created unique identities for themselves.

Critical review of the existing literature on African women writers clearly shows that nowhere is the question of writing as a cultural negotiation posed, discussed or much less addressed. This is a lacuna that this dissertation addresses for the first time by proposing a re-reading of the selected works of Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ and Marie NDiaye through the new prism of writing as part of cultural negotiation. In doing so, the dissertation goes beyond the paradigm of binary oppositions that undergirds the critical literature on writing by Sub-Saharan women in favor of the innovative concept of negotiation. In addressing womens issues such as marriage and polygamy, motherhood and witchcraft, this study makes the powerful case that Mariama Bâ, Ama Ata Aidoo and Marie NDiaye have negotiated a space of creativity for themselves through writing, hitherto the preserve of men, and from which they pose, discuss and address through negotiation, those cultural issues affecting them. Chapter One, with brief biographical sketches of the writers and a summary of their texts, deals with the theoretical framework for the study by providing the critical overview of Sub-Saharan women writers and in-depth analyses of the concepts of writing, negotiation and culture in order to explain how these women writers are able to negotiate their respective cultures in their writing. In Chapter Two, hybridity and its perils are discussed specifically in relation to the colonizer/colonized binary model. Through this binary, displacement of authority is engendered by means of a series of mimetic identifications with the colonizer by the colonized in an ambivalent hybridized cultural space. We discuss interracial and inter-caste polygamy and their role in the victimization of women in Chapter Three. Chapter Four questions the notion that motherhood is the equivalent of mens reproductive labor and a source of oppression suggests that empowerment can be derived from surrogacy and freedom of choice. Chapter Five explores modern day beliefs in witchcraft and its cultural impact on women. From the feminist theoretical perspective, the study suggests that witchcraft, if reclaimed by women, is a powerful negotiating tool.

This project examines themes of race, gender, and nation in a series of four novels by nineteenth-century Louisiana author Sidonie de la Houssaye. The series, called Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans (The Quadroons of New Orleans), is based on the system of plaçage. Plaçage, a system of concubinage in which white men took women of mixed racial heritage (such as quadroons) as mistresses, becomes a source of conflict and contradiction in the series. The author sees plaçage as a tragic necessity for some educated and morally upright quarteronnes. For others, those quarteronnes depicted as libidinous and avaricious, it is a means of benefiting from the destruction of families from the upper echelons of white society. Between these binaristic visions of plaçage, I found that de la Houssaye also offers a more nuanced vision of life in New Orleans for women and women of color in particular. I refer to these nuances as liminal spaces; spaces of in-betweenness. In the first two chapters, I explore the liminal racial status of the heroines and how that liminality becomes the basis for a performative model of race. In the third and fourth chapters, I explore the connections between peformativity in gender and its connections to performative race. In the final chapters, I explore how the author envisions Louisiana as a place that lacks a unified sense of nationality and how that lack affects the lives of the characters and the author herself. Although it has long been ignored, the liminal space that is Louisiana has produced a significant body of literature in French as well as in English. These novels are a fascinating sample of the francophone Louisiana oeuvre. They also, as I argue, address issues that are currently of great interest to literary scholars working in the fields of gender, race, and postcolonial studies. It is my hope that readers of this dissertation will agree that these novels, and Louisiana literature in general, merit a great deal of further study.

Language attitudes represent a serious challenge for Haitian education policy makers. This research is the first attempt to study the attitudes of elementary school educators toward the linguistic situation in Haiti. A survey of 154 teachers addressed their attitudes toward language use, preference and choice, and their stereotypes toward other Haitian native speakers. Three instruments (quantitative questionnaire, Match-Guise-Technique, and qualitative questionnaire) were utilized and two Statistical Methods (descriptive and inference), along with Chi-Square were used in order to observe the significance of differences in independent variables. Since Haitian teachers who participated in this study were assumed bilingual, the questionnaire first aimed to demonstrate the extent to which they spoke, understood, and wrote French and Creole. This hypothesis was strongly supported and differences in participants reactions were significant at p=0.05. In addition to being significant, the differences were meaningful because they were relatively large and unidirectional; e.g., although the majority of participants spoke and understood Creole better than French, the majority wrote French better than Creole. The results on language use showed that Creole alone is predominantly used in informal domains. Code switching was mostly observed in less formal situations. The usage of French alone was predominant only in official settings. These differences were significant at P=0.001. The data on language preference corroborated findings of the preceding sections. The Haitian educators preferred French to Creole for achieving objectives of education. The Match-Guise-Technique revealed that educators hold positive attitudes toward French and the mesolect (the urban Creole), but negative attitudes toward the basilect (the rural Creole). Differences, however, were not significant (P=0.05). Finally, it emerged that bilingualism, education, politics, and poverty are very closely related in Haiti. Therefore, an adequate language and education policy may expand bilingualism and well possibly reduce poverty. Yet, to the extent that bilingualism continues to rise, the basilectal variety has a corresponding tendency to diminish progressively. These latter results are discussed in details with respect to their general implications for education and language policy.

This project examines the question of memory and cross-cultural identities in the context of diasporic cultures, focusing in particular on the works of two Algerian women: Fadhma Amrouche and her daughter Taos Amrouche. Both occupy a unique position in Maghrebian literature. Precursors of womens writing in Algeria, their works reflect the experience of exile and displacement, and the shift from orality to the written word, from artistic creation to preservation of cultural patrimony, from identity crisis to a quest of ones own cultural identity. Women writers at this time were marginalized and Fadhmas and Taos marginalization appear as threefold. Firstly, they belong to a Berber ethnic minority in a country that is mainly Arab. Secondly, from a religious point of view, they are Christian in a predominantly Muslim country. Finally, Fadhmas and Taos French education enables them to pass from a traditional oral culture to the written culture of men and as a consequence to experience cultural alienation in the process. This study explores how both authors articulate through writing, a mémoire of the sufferings and desires of Berber women in a society that has repressed their voices or has confined them to the domain of the spoken. French colonial occupation of Algeria radically changed womens lives. Colonial officials and European settlers manipulated representations of Algerian women - both visual and textual to suit the needs of imperialist designs. Women were often viewed as victims: silent, veiled, submissive and oppressed. This tendency to represent women as victims reinforced the colonizers belief that Algerian culture was backward. This study considers Fadhmas and Taos texts as response to the destructive colonial practice of fictionalizing native womens lives. Autobiographical writing provides a site from which they can assert their subjectivity, a site of resistance in a context of colonial and cultural oppression. In these womens texts, we examine the various ways that gender, ethnicity, race, class and religious affiliation intersect and shape their lives, and explore their various strategies of negotiation and resistance to dominant and oppressive discourses.

New Orleans culinary history is amongst the most rich and storied of any American city, yet very few academic works have addressed this subject. While texts ranging from cookbooks to explorers journals offer glimpses into the evolution of the gastronomy of the city, the stories they present are often rife with myth, legend, and misinterpretation. Contemporary and historic authors also paint a misleading picture of the evolutionary processes involved in the creation of the cuisine and gastronomy of New Orleans, presenting a melting-pot model that portrays the culinary landscape of the city as a homogenous and over-simplified product of a vague set of contributions from a diverse set of nations, while ignoring the actual disparity in the contributions of these nations, as well as much of the contemporary evidence that links modern culinary and gastronomic practices to their Old World ancestors. This French-language work proposes that New Orleans cuisine and gastronomy as we know it today descends principally from French and West African cuisines, borrowing from a vast array of nations as it underwent various stages of creolization and culinary metamorphosis. Examining the food and foodways found in the restaurants, homes, and festivals of the city, this paper aims to trace the evolutionary process that transformed the dishes, practices, and ideas of the cuisines of francophone nations in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean into a cuisine often hailed as one of Americas finest. It seeks to identify the various methods of Americanization that have molded the modern culinary landscape of New Orleans and Louisiana, as well as to identify the multitude of vestiges that not only reinforce the historic ties between the food of New Orleans and that of its ancestral nations, but also disprove the assimilationist melting pot model. It is also perhaps the first work to analyze the collective influence of the French-speaking nations of the world on the cuisine and gastronomy of New Orleans.

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study examining the phonetic variation in the speech of four generations of Cajun French women, living in four Louisiana parishes: Avoyelles, Lafourche, St Landry and Vermillon. Based on the Gold 1975 corpus and the Dubois 1997 Cajun French corpus available at LSU, a sample of 29 speakers was chosen for the analysis of five traditional phonetic variables: O in front of nasals MM/NN and liquids R and L, in front of R, E in front of R and at the third person ending of the imparfait, J in lexical words, personal pronoun JE, and Z in liaison structures like nous-autres. Following the quantitative methodology, a total of over 20 000 tokens were codified and analyzed with analytical softwares such as Statview 4.5 and Goldvarb to determine the direction of the variation observed. After the first frequency analysis, we found an apparent rise in the use of the dialectal features in the younger generations. Because Cajun French is a minority language in an endangered situation due to a lack of constitutional support and a dramatic decreasing number of speakers, it appeared rather impossible that the tendency observed could be a true language change. We decided to further our analysis by comparing the two interviews in French available in the Dubois 1997 corpus for each speaker. One interview was lead by a native Cajun French speaker and the other one by a student speaking academic French. This comparison aims to measure the degree of adaptation to a specific linguistic situation by Cajun French speakers. The results of the comparative study shows that the rate of dialectal features used by each speaker significantly drops when they speak to the outsider interviewer. This proves that what we observe is not a language change but rather the fact that Cajun women in our sample have maintained their ability to adapt stylistically to the variety of French being spoken to them. This goes against the theory of linguistic shrinkage, stating that when a language is dying, the speakers lose their ability to detect and adjust to different ranges of styles.

The nineteenth-century Francophone literatures of Haiti and Louisiana are often dismissed as pale imitations of literary trends in metropolitan France. This study revisits these literatures and explores how Creole writers used borrowed ideas and imitated styles to assemble "relational" Creole identities. Two interrelated spiritual practices-the mid-century craze for "table turning" commonly known as modern Spiritualism, and the syncretistic New World religion Vodou-structured these writers' mimetic methods, enabling them to speak as, and thereby subvert the hegemony of, their cultural forebears. In France, the mid-century interest in Spiritualism provided French fantastic literature with a useful system for producing the many "revenants" that populate fantastic fiction. These tales also reveal Spiritualism's larger role as a model for trans-Atlantic cultural production, and demonstrate metropolitan anxiety about the exotic colonial Other. In a similar way, Victor Hugo, confronted by the destabilizing possibility of a polyvocal au-delà, found it necessary to defend his singular visionary genius from the polluting voices of the spirits. In Louisiana, Spiritualism gave free-black poets a tool to channel and challenge the voices of their literary heroes in France. In the mouths of these Creole copyists, the singular Romantic subjectivity that Hugo sought to defend became splintered and distorted, allowing them to construct a hybrid identity by adopting calqued literary voices. In a similar way the Haitian Vodou adept served as a vessel for the diverse deities that displaced his or her personality. Haiti's mimetic literature plays on the Vodou ritual practice of possession as it copies European models. Thus what Jean Price-Mars famously described as Haiti's literary Bovarism is better understood as a nascent literary hybridity. The Spiritualist séance and the Vodou ceremony enabled adepts to harness the power and authority of the great figures of Western culture by exploiting the portability of their voices. In this way, the nineteenth-century literatures of Francophone Haiti and Louisiana are not pale imitations of Hugo and other French models; they are failed imitations--copies that deviate from their models in order to open up a space for a provisional, relational Creole identity.

Cajun French presents variable use of linguistic features, as any other variety of French does. Many Cajun French features are considered as deviant from the French norm or triggered by attrition although fluent speakers of Cajun French have always used them. In this sociolinguistic study, we analyze the use of locative prepositions. We add two important dimensions to existing studies: real-time evidence for a diachronic descriptive perspective, and a methodological tool, measuring the degree of exposure to French (MDI). This approach allows us to establish the local prepositional norm of Cajun French and phenomena due to attrition. Large amounts of data for the study of eight categories of locative prepositions are taken from the Cajun French corpus constructed by Dubois in 1997, and also a few interviews conducted by Gold, Louder and Waddell in 1975 are integrated. Our first goal is to determine the overall distribution of prepositions in Cajun French. We discuss their usage in different varieties of French. We show which prepositions are part of the local prepositional norm and which ones are infrequent, sporadic usages that belong to the innovative norm in Cajun French. As a second goal, we present the complex linguistic conditioning system for prepositions in Cajun French, which the fluent and almost all restricted speakers respect. The third goal is to study the effects of the social conditioning. We demonstrate that the local norms are well maintained usages, while the innovative ones are due to language change. We found that some innovations originate in the combined effect of linguistic attrition and change over time, while others have been introduced early as localized usages. Although the young generation shows the highest usage of these forms, they are not responsible for their introduction, but adopt them. Using systemic and extralinguistic criteria, we determined the direct interference from English and internal motivation as sources of the innovations. While diatopic variation overall is weak, Avoyelles parish shows a higher retention of a few long-standing usages than St. Landry and Lafourche, the two other regions under study.