specialcollections@tulane.edu / This dissertation looks at the complex set of representations of Native Americans of the upper and lower Mississippi Valley at stake in four French cultural productions of the late 17th to mid-18th century (1683-1753). These cultural productions extend throughout the French colonial effort in Louisiana. They include two travel narratives – Louis Hennepin’s Découverte de la Louisiane (1683) and Jean-François Benjamin Dumont de Montigny’s Mémoires Historiques (1753) – a newspaper chronicle from the Mercure de France, which relates the visit of five Louisianan Natives to Paris in 1725, and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s entrée Les Sauvages (1736) from his opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes. Through a close literary and musical analysis of these four cultural productions, this dissertation uncovers the multifold and dissonant discourses displayed when representing Native Louisianans. This research is grounded in the understanding that representations of indigenous characters provide limited knowledge about the Louisianan tribes, yet reveal extensive information about their authors, intended audience, and consequently about French identity and culture during this time. These dissonant discourses reflect major uncertainties about the French colonial venture in Louisiana, inquiries into other models of societal organizations and sets of values, interrogations about the potential degeneration of European civilization, questioning of the universality of the Christian faith, and epistemological contradictions associated with the curiosity toward foreign cultures. Moving away from the binary opposition between the “noble” or “ignoble” savage, this dissertation demonstrates how the complex image of Native Americans is fabricated and used to mirror the contemporaneous conflicting epistemologies characterizing the late years of early modern France. / 1 / Sophie Capmartin

This thesis examines social and economic change among Black Creoles in the sugarcane plantation society of St. Martin Parish, Louisiana. It begins with slavery and emphasizes the last 40 years. The study area is viewed as a creole society set in the United States. Change and adaptation is analysed from the perspective of those lacking access to, and control over, resources ensuring socio-economic advancement. Factors of race and ethnicity are crucial to the analysis. / Changes in the agricultural economy have cast blacks off the land. In local settlements, they form a surplus labor pool. In today's industrial, neoplantation economy, Civil Rights legislation and alliances beyond the study area have ensured black participation, particularly at a textile mill, resulting in fragile prosperity. Their dual Afro-Creole identity, viewed through language, music, and food, faces a questionable future as alliances external to the creole society are strengthened.

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Cette thèse représente le résultat d’une analyse linguistique et d’une description lexicographique des variantes topolectales du français de la Louisiane telles que relevées dans un corpus de théâtre cadien contemporain. Nous présentons nos résultats sous la forme d’un glossaire dont les articles sont conçus selon l’approche de la lexicographie historico-comparative et différentielle. En analysant ces lexèmes et leurs emplois dans une triple perspective : diachronique, diastratique et diatopique, nous effectuons un classement rigoureux de chaque régionalisme sur les axes historique et différentiel.À travers notre traitement lexicographique, nous portons une attention spéciale aux mots d’origine inconnue et aux anglicismes, qui ont trop souvent été traités d’une manière sommaire par le passé. Nous présentons l’histoire de chaque particularité, et expliquons la raison d’être de chaque néologisme, information jusqu’à aujourd’hui non disponible pour la plupart de ces lexèmes. / This doctoral thesis represents the result of a linguistic analysis and a lexicographic description of topolectal variants of French in Louisiana selected from a corpus of contemporary Cajun theater. We present our findings through the form of a glossary whose articles are conceived in the approach of comparative, historical and differential lexicography. Analyzing these lexemes and their usage in a triple perspective: chronological, stratificational and topological, we carry out a rigorous classification of each regionalism on the historical and differential levels.Through our lexicographical treatment, will pay special attention to words of unknown origin and to Anglicisms, which have too often been treated in the past in a summary manner. We present the history of each particularity, and explain the reason behind each neologism, information which has been missing until now for the majority of these terms.