North America’s Francophone Borderlands

Abstract

In The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History , Bill Marshall cites data from the 2000 US census indicating that “13 million Americans are believed to be of French descent,” and 1.6 million respondents to the census “declared that they spoke French at home, the third highest figure for a language other than English, after Spanish and Chinese” (Marshall 2009, 4). Nevertheless, the fact of French in North America (especially outside of Quebec) seems to be a perennial surprise to many. Historically, many of the French speakers in North America have been located in contested areas at the edges of the United States and of Canada: southern Louisiana, northern New England, and Maine, which bleeds into the territory formerly known as Acadia (now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia). Much of what Marshall says about the city of New Orleans holds true for other Francophone regions of North America: they are “zone[s] of cultural and racial miscegenation” that do not easily fit into the popular paradigms about the development of US and Canadian nationhood or culture (Marshall 2009, 219). Rather, they are akin to the borderland, described by Gloria Anzaldúa in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza as “a vague and undetermined place created by emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” a place “in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). Within the Americas, such regions are of particular value for Comparative American Studies, which, as Florian Freitag notes in this volume, “offers an opportunity to consider regions, regional writing, and regionalism in contexts that transcend the national” (ch. 11, 201).