Memory's warp: The cultural politics of history and race in south Louisiana

This dissertation focuses on the construction of racial and class distinctions through everyday narratives and historical commemorations, as a case study of the making and use of collective history in contemporary North America. The main empirical focus is the recent proliferation of Acadian or Cajun historical sites in south Louisiana, and its relationship to the cultural and political developments of the region's post-segregation social order. Based on archival research and fieldwork, it provides an ethnographic account of both everyday and discursive configurations of history and temporality, and the articulation of these to racial and class formation.; This study approaches these issues from three distinct but interrelated perspectives. The first one focuses on everyday narratives, and relies on ethnographic data from fieldwork in St. Martinville, a small town in the south central part of the state. By situating the shifting everyday use of racial, class, and temporal categories in relation to post Civil Rights era transformations, I suggest that acts of classification construe divergent and heterogeneous temporalities, through which social exclusions and hierarchy are articulated.; Secondly, I propose a genealogy of Cajun and Acadian as classifications in a field of power/knowledge, with particular attention to the historicizing and racializing dimensions of their use. Analyzing media and scholarly representations and focusing on recent shifts in the meaning of race and their implications for historical discourse, I suggest that the center of historical representation in the region has shifted away from rhetorics of racial superiority, and toward a symbolic economy of collective contributions and suffering in which both blacks and whites compete.; Finally, I address questions about the poetics and politics of contemporary historical representation in St. Martinville, examining two recently opened and adjacent sites, the Museum of the Acadian Memorial and the African American Museum. Drawing on ethnographic material, I connect the aforementioned trends to how exhibit producers engaged the classed and raced notions of collective development, improvement, and progress embedded in historical discourse. Ultimately, I suggest that through their constructions of subjectivity and temporality, the museums are sites for inventing agents who might intervene in contemporary struggles.