Dissertation: Imagining Acadiana: Cajun Identity in Modern Louisiana
This dissertation tells the history of how a modern Cajun identity developed in 20th century Louisiana. I argue that upwardly mobile Cajun community leaders renegotiated their own collective identity by engaging directly with mass culture and modernity. This identity is rooted in two competing perceptions. First, since at least the late the 19th century, outsiders perceived Cajuns as an isolated and ignorant group, due to their largely lower-class status and Franco-Catholic Acadian ethnicity. Second, beginning in the 1920s, Cajuns began to be seen as whiter and their Acadian ethnicity more refined which resulted in increased economic, social, and political power. This tension between a mythical and whiter Acadian identity and a historical and more ethnic Cajun identity would come to define the region of Southwest Louisiana that became known as Acadiana. This project disrupts assumptions that Cajun traditions survived solely through cultural tenacity and isolation, as well as narratives that position modernity as only a harbinger of cultural degradation, by blurring the line between tradition and modernity itself.
The term Acadiana itself captures this paradox: it linguistically weaved the memory of the Acadian past into Louisiana’s modern cultural and economic landscape but was popularized by a local television company to describe its modern Cajun viewership. By examining key moments in the development of the region’s cultural identity from the 1920s-1970s, this dissertation shows how Acadiana emerged through the creation of regional Cajun culture industries that responded to new social, political, and technological forms. The work of these local community leaders makes clear that Acadiana’s traditional cultures did not survive in spite of modernity, but by engaging with the opportunities it presented for power, preservation, and profit.
Please reach out to me at jessicadoeshistory [at] gmail [dot] com for a copy of this dissertation.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Dauterive, Jessica, Matthew B. Karush, and Michael O’Malley. “Hearing the Americas: Understanding the Early Recording Industry with Digital Tools.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 22, no. 4 (2023): 427–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781423000178.
This open access article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas, a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas, showing in each case how digital tools generate new insights. The first case uses mapping to reveal some of the specific ways in which the economic and social context of Jim Crow shaped the experiences of Black performers; the second integrates sound and text to reveal the origins of certain blues conventions in the racist stereotypes of minstrel shows; and the final case uses digital tools to argue that the marketing strategies of the recording industry throughout the Americas helped produce a key shift in patterns of globalization.
Online Publications
I am Managing Editor of New Orleans Historical, an online storytelling project that shares multimedia, place-based histories with the public.
I have also contributed stories and tours to the site including:
I published a selection of digital humanities tool reviews for the online resource World History Commons including:
I served as Editor-at-Large for the online publication Digital Humanities Now, which compiles weekly round-ups of DH materials from across the web.
