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- Title
Creating a Franco-America for the New Millennium: Normand Beaupré's La Souillonne.
- Authors
Blood, Elizabeth; Duclos-Orsello, Elizabeth
- Abstract
This article responds to the charge recently made by some social historians that Franco-Americans no longer exist as a real community. Without denying that an older definition of communal identity has disappeared, this close look at Norman Beaupré's dramatic monologue La Souillonne highlights the ways in which the text creates an alternative definition of Franco-American identity. This identity is rooted not in the traditional markers of language, religion, and shared geography, but rather in a community of memory shaped by the telling and retelling of stories, thus creating a new Franco-America. La Souillonne highlights the role of women as culture-bearers and creates a mental and emotional landscape of shared memories that today's Franco-Americans - no longer predominantly French-speaking and necessarily practicing Catholics, and now far removed from the immediacy of the immigrant experience - can appropriate and onto which they can map their own family stories.
- Subjects
LA Souillonne (Book); BEAUPRE, Norman; FRENCH American literature; ETHNIC identity of French Americans; COLLECTIVE memory; WOMEN in literature
- Publication
Quebec Studies, 2016, Vol 61, p3
- ISSN
0737-3759
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3828/qs.2016.2