St. Martinville, 1898 Mardi Gras
My current book project, Chansons créoles: A New Genealogy of the French Middle Ages, explores nineteenth-century French efforts to transcribe and archive orality in francophone peripheries such as Brittany, Normandy, Acadia, St. Martinville, New Orleans, Guadeloupe and Martinique. The book reveals the French Middle Ages as an ideological product of the francophone Atlantic. My claim is that the idea of the French Middle Ages, the conceptual matrix in which it became thinkable and desirable as a coherent subject of study, was founded upon engagements with minoritized francophones who were assumed to embody the deep past.
This story begins in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France launched an effort to harness 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, and other “primitive” forms of French cultural expression they considered to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation and in vernacular scribbles maintained among farmers, domestic laborers, freedwomen and men, schoolchildren and other peripheral "folk."
Chansons créoles focuses on four sites of entanglement: the Hauts-de-France, lower Canada, the Antilles, and coastal Louisiana. Using personal letters, minutes from scholarly meetings, vernacular manuscripts, poetry anthologies, fieldnotes, scrapbooks, and college curricula, I demonstrate 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, I marshal examples of contestation and meaning making among Francophonie who asserted themselves as agents and subjects of their own histories and articulated their own relationship to medieval French literatures. By focusing on the hyper-local contingencies in which the discipline's formative practices first took shape, my project lays the groundwork for fresh imaginings of the medieval as an unstable, fraught, yet continuous co-production of multiple voices and subject-positions.
Following a trajectory aligned with my own family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Martinique and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville, this project reveals the French premodern as it flickers in carnival festivities, mortuary rituals, saints’ shrines and processions, cultural memory, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled “medieval” past that is indeed past. It interweaves archival and manuscript research from libraries in France, Canada, the US, and the Caribbean, with family and community memory, in order to emphasize the multiple, intersecting timelines and cultural accretions through which we come to generate a present reckoning of the premodern past.
This story begins in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Comité de la langue, de l’histoire et des arts de la France launched an effort to harness 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, and other “primitive” forms of French cultural expression they considered to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation and in vernacular scribbles maintained among farmers, domestic laborers, freedwomen and men, schoolchildren and other peripheral "folk."
Chansons créoles focuses on four sites of entanglement: the Hauts-de-France, lower Canada, the Antilles, and coastal Louisiana. Using personal letters, minutes from scholarly meetings, vernacular manuscripts, poetry anthologies, fieldnotes, scrapbooks, and college curricula, I demonstrate 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, I marshal examples of contestation and meaning making among Francophonie who asserted themselves as agents and subjects of their own histories and articulated their own relationship to medieval French literatures. By focusing on the hyper-local contingencies in which the discipline's formative practices first took shape, my project lays the groundwork for fresh imaginings of the medieval as an unstable, fraught, yet continuous co-production of multiple voices and subject-positions.
Following a trajectory aligned with my own family’s circuitous wonderings from Paris and Caen to Martinique and Acadia and finally to New Orleans and St. Martinville, this project reveals the French premodern as it flickers in carnival festivities, mortuary rituals, saints’ shrines and processions, cultural memory, and the performance of Cajun and Creole ballads and danses rondes, all of which challenge simple notions of an untangled “medieval” past that is indeed past. It interweaves archival and manuscript research from libraries in France, Canada, the US, and the Caribbean, with family and community memory, in order to emphasize the multiple, intersecting timelines and cultural accretions through which we come to generate a present reckoning of the premodern past.