C'est hardly that bad: An essay on Acadian hybridity in Baie Sainte-Marie

This dissertation, which takes the form of a personal essay, explores a complex range of social, cultural and literary issues and their impact on hybrid Acadian identity. It is framed by other Acadian essayists (Roy, Chiasson, Forest, Maillet) and informed by postmodern theorists (Lévy, Haraway, Baudrillard, Barthes).

Vertical or hierarchical manifestations of Acadian culture are being transformed and crowded out by its horizontal or more organic manifestations. The horizontal flow of authentic cultural production and networking is eroding cultural myth, simulacra, and the vertical towers of hierarchy, patriarchy, and elitism. These vertical exponents of Acadian culture have been long internalized and continue to be replicated by the culture itself, thus playing a part in the construction of identity. However, I argue that these linear structures are not the only building blocks of Acadian identity; its horizontal undercurrents and organic groupings have in fact been part of Acadian life since the very beginning. Furthermore, this juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical structures in a culturally fertile environment gives rise to many hybrids--cultural and otherwise.

Situated at the intersection of francophone and anglophone cultures, contemporary Acadie is a perfect example of cultural hybridity. Acadian language or acadjonne, a mix of seventeenth-century French and modern English, is perhaps the most obvious manifestation of Acadian hybridity. This hybrid Acadian language, and Acadian culture by extension, is being drawn in opposite directions by, on the one hand, the francophone elite who wills it to be standard French by inscribing it with complexes and shame, and, on the other hand, by its grassroots proponents who remain unfettered by their own hybridity. Like language, Acadian art and ultimately Acadian identity are also characterized by hybridity, in terms of content as well as form. By a close reading of the notions of history, of place, and of self, I argue that this very hybridity catapults pre-modern Acadian culture straight into the twenty-first century, where biotechnological hybrids and cyborgs abound.