Chansons créoles explores nineteenth-century French efforts to archive orality in francophone peripheries such as Brittany, Normandy, Acadia, St. Martinville, New Orleans, and Pointe-à-Pitre. Following a trajectory aligned with my own family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Guadeloupe and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville, the book reveals the French premodern as it flickers in family memory, carnival festivities, saints’ shrines and processions, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled past that is past, over, complete.
It starts with a collection of folksongs: in 1852, the Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France launched an effort to record the French national spirit in its oldest and purest forms by cataloguing a heritage of French poésies populaires, that is, the oral sayings and songs of people who were understood to be natural, simple, and uninfluenced by the distorting forces of high culture or elite education. French scholars, bureaucrats, and folklorists thus set about collecting oral songs and tales from marginalized Francophonie whom they assumed to embody the deep past. In the provinces and in colonial and settler territories they hunted for heretofore unknown epic poetry, contes, prayers, and other “primitive” forms of French cultural expression they considered to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation among farmers, domestic laborers, freedwomen and men, schoolchildren and other peripheral "folk."
Chansons créoles focuses on such recitations from four sites: the Hauts-de-France, lower Canada, the Antilles, and coastal Louisiana. Using personal letters, minutes from scholarly meetings, vernacular manuscripts, poetry anthologies, fieldnotes, family scrapbooks, and college curricula, the book demonstrates how French scholars forged the tools of their craft—philology, text editing, variant comparison—on the vernacular chants and lore of marginalized French speakers, descendants of the enslaved, and indigenous francophone communities in the Atlantic whose assumed unassimilability predicated their medievality. At the same time, it marshals examples of contestation and meaning making among Francophonie who asserted themselves as agents and subjects of their own histories and articulated an alternate relationship to medieval French literatures and the past more generally. By focusing on the hyper-local contingencies in which the discipline's formative practices first took shape, this book lays groundwork for fresh imaginings of the medieval as an unstable, fraught, yet continuous co-production of multiple voices and subject-positions. Along the way, it aims to reimagine and remodel history writing itself: to resist chronicity and embrace the multiple folds of time and scales of historic significance that crash into one another and reassemble in vibrant combinations to make meaning in everyday lives.
It starts with a collection of folksongs: in 1852, the Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France launched an effort to record the French national spirit in its oldest and purest forms by cataloguing a heritage of French poésies populaires, that is, the oral sayings and songs of people who were understood to be natural, simple, and uninfluenced by the distorting forces of high culture or elite education. French scholars, bureaucrats, and folklorists thus set about collecting oral songs and tales from marginalized Francophonie whom they assumed to embody the deep past. In the provinces and in colonial and settler territories they hunted for heretofore unknown epic poetry, contes, prayers, and other “primitive” forms of French cultural expression they considered to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation among farmers, domestic laborers, freedwomen and men, schoolchildren and other peripheral "folk."
Chansons créoles focuses on such recitations from four sites: the Hauts-de-France, lower Canada, the Antilles, and coastal Louisiana. Using personal letters, minutes from scholarly meetings, vernacular manuscripts, poetry anthologies, fieldnotes, family scrapbooks, and college curricula, the book demonstrates how French scholars forged the tools of their craft—philology, text editing, variant comparison—on the vernacular chants and lore of marginalized French speakers, descendants of the enslaved, and indigenous francophone communities in the Atlantic whose assumed unassimilability predicated their medievality. At the same time, it marshals examples of contestation and meaning making among Francophonie who asserted themselves as agents and subjects of their own histories and articulated an alternate relationship to medieval French literatures and the past more generally. By focusing on the hyper-local contingencies in which the discipline's formative practices first took shape, this book lays groundwork for fresh imaginings of the medieval as an unstable, fraught, yet continuous co-production of multiple voices and subject-positions. Along the way, it aims to reimagine and remodel history writing itself: to resist chronicity and embrace the multiple folds of time and scales of historic significance that crash into one another and reassemble in vibrant combinations to make meaning in everyday lives.