Franco-American Cultures in a New World Perspective

Over forty prominent novelists from around the world signed a media petition in 2007 expressing their support for a new cosmopolitan definition of literature written in French.Rejecting the categorization "francophone" as devaluing, they demanded recognition of a "littérature-monde en français," a world literature in French attentive to new voices from the postcolony, or what in this essay I will call a "worldly" literature in French.A book quickly emerged following the manifesto, reassembling petitioners and rearticulating their positions, which call into question the French republican narrative. 1 In it they ask: Is French cultural production too narrowly defined?In response, scholars have organized conferences and special journal issues to further explore this broad conception of French literature. 2 If writers, journalists, and even politicians have made much ado over the "littératuremonde en français" debate, it is because what is at issue is how French culture and identity are to be defined in the twenty-first century."Official" French culture has typically emanated from narrow channels in Paris, from the metropolitan seat of power and prestige.For this reason, it is significant that Parisian literary circles have begun to recognize French cultural production from outside the establishment in the recent decades.Can French literatures from without transform the way in which French and francophone culture is conceived?This question is part of an ongoing and lively debate, one that includes the littérature-monde discussion.In my study of Franco-American literatures and cultures, a New-World phenomenon within the French postcolonial realm, I will suggest that written texts challenge underlying assumptions about la Francophonie and francophone studies, two ambiguous and often distinct entities.They also call into question the meaning of French culture more broadly.A more worldly conception of culture can provide a framework for understanding obscure and often ambiguously francophone literatures-works that fall outside the accepted corpus of texts that make up the French canon.I examine cultural production from an often forgotten corner of the French-speaking world: francophone North America, an area that is just now beginning to receive more scholarly attention.My essay focuses specifically on the diasporic French and francophone cultures of Quebec and New England, with less attention paid to Louisiana.A fully developed conception of "littérature-monde en français" ought to recognize the work that writers from these cultures have contributed in the four centuries since French settlers first came to the North American continent.Recent scholarly works point to a growing interest in francophone North America.In 2007 a special issue of The French Review explored French influence in the United States 3 and in 2009 in the journal Contemporary French and francophone Studies, Marvin Richards made a case for putting studies of French presence in North America on the metaphorical map. 4 In these studies diasporic populations and cultures of North America are positioned quite interestingly between French and francophone; they are souvenirs of a French past in the New World dating back to the sixteenth century and a twenty-first century francophone and American present and future.This new interest in Franco-America extends beyond scholarly investigations to the teaching of language and culture.Two current intermediate French language textbooks, Pause-Café and Réseau, situate "Franco-America" on the literal map of the greater francophone world, which can help inform American students about French influence in the New World outside of Quebec and Louisiana, areas with which they are likely to be already familiar. 5Heritages francophones is another current French text that specifically explores the diversity at the heart of lives lived in French in the United States. 6definition of the terms relating to North American French and francophone cultures is necessary for the purposes of clarity.Readers will find French and francophone, French-Canadian, Franco-American as well Franco-America used throughout this essay.Franco-America is a place found on no map but one that exists in the minds of some people of French descent in Canada and the United States.7 It is a place in which French heritage is acknowledged and where residents can still express elements of cultural life.The French came to the New World with Cartier, Champlain, and other explorers in the seventeenth century.8 A few remained, built homes and towns, and raised large families.Allan Greer argues that spectacular reproduction is largely responsible for continued French presence in North America today.9People who became known as canadiens français-and later québécois-left the impoverished province in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in search of work and better lives.Acadians were forced into exile much earlier, in the mid eighteenth century, and some settled in Louisiana.Almost a million people left Quebec between 1840 and 1930 and settled in New England, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts south to Connecticut and New York State, where they worked in the textile mills. 10They arrived as French-Canadians but became progressively Franco-Americans.By 1900, French-Canadian immigrants to the United States began to call themselves Franco-Americans in newspaper articles and novels.They created French ethnic neighborhoods, "les Petits Canadas," where a growing sense of self could be cultivated.A constructed notion of Franco-American identity, shaped most notably by French language and Catholic faith, emerged in their recorded stories of material and cultural survival, of survivance, as it is called in Franco-American circles.Franco-Americans, or Francos more intimately, are known also as the "French" of industrial New England; they lived in the "French" neighborhood and attended the "French" church.Some today are French-speaking, francophone both linguistically as well as historically, by way of France's particular colonial trajectory.For others the French connection has largely disappeared.The Franco-American experience is a familiar immigrant experience in many ways, similar to that of other hyphenated American groups juggling cultural preservation and assimilation throughout the twentieth century.The cultures of "les Petits Canadas" of New England, however, are far less well known than the Little Italies or Chinatowns of the American urban landscape.Reading Franco-American cultures within the scope of a world literature in French will perhaps help rescue them from their ethnic ghetto and academic isolation.On 16 March 2007, during the Salon du livre in Paris, forty-four writers made a plea for a change in the cultural status quo in France's center-left daily newspaper Le Monde, denouncing French (i.e., Parisian) culture as a dominant force either blind or patronizing toward cultural production beyond France's economic, political, and intellectual center.That previous fall, several of the most prestigious literary prizes went to authors who choose to write in French but

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