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Conclusion: Local Pride, Global Connections Twenty-First-Century Cajuns A Boulder, Colorado, restaurant advertises its Ragin’ Cajun burger; Southern Season, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, shop, currently sells Ragin’ Cajun snack mix; and B21, a pub in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, offers a Rajun Cajun turkey sandwich as part of its menu. While this moniker continues to refer to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette mascot, it now has also been appropriated by businesses outside of south Louisiana to label spicy foods. The Boulder restaurant, the Chapel Hill store, and the Williamsport pub prove how widespread national interest in everything Cajun has become since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first published Evangeline in 1847. While the United States still demonstrates its fascination with Cajun culture through its proliferation of Cajun restaurants , movies,1 and Cajun characters in popular fiction,2 Cajun music has also gained an international audience through cultural appropriation. Australia, Holland, Germany, and Great Britain now advertise Cajun bands.3 As Cajuns reconcile their Cajun and American identities as illustrated through their endeavors to embrace their difference through literary representation, the international community enacts an assimilation process because of its interest in this Cajun difference, mirroring the literary Americanization of Cajuns that began with Longfellow. When Germans are listening to Cajun bands, it is clear that globalization has become a part of the story of Cajun representation in the twentyfirst century, demonstrating how much Cajun culture has altered over the course of the last hundred years. In a world where the Internet links local products and populations to an international community, Cajun, along with numerous other ethnic signifiers, has become a recognized term on the global market even as it remains a regional label of pride among Cajuns themselves. In his study of the World Wide Web’s effects on Cajun culture, Stephen Webre argues that the Internet can be employed as a tool for constructing identity since such a system offers “the opportunity for 143 144 / Becoming Cajun, Becoming American reconnection afforded to Cajuns in the new diaspora,” a diaspora caused to some degree by the 1980s oil bust, which “sent educated and technicallytrained Louisianians migrating out of state in search of economic opportunity ” (444). In interesting ways, Webre’s article, “Among the Cybercajuns : Constructing Identity in the Virtual Diaspora,” frames its discussion of the Internet through a similar trajectory found in the study of Cajun literature by opening with references to Longfellow’s Evangeline and closing with a discussion of how English, not Cajun French, is the dominant language of such Cajun sites. Webre explains this domination in reference to how “Cajuns have historically communicated with non-Cajuns in English, and communication with non-Cajuns about what it means to be Cajun, and about how the experience can be shared by those unfortunate enough not to have been born to it, is an implicit, and sometimes explicit, purpose of virtually all Cybercajun web sites” (454). Much like contemporary Cajun literature, Cajun Web sites are used to inform cultural outsiders and to share memories of cultural traditions, simultaneously providing a place for educating others and a space for reunion among the people themselves. Like literature, such sites do so through translation framed within an already accepted notion of American identification, which offers the possibility of embracing difference from within a process of assimilation . The Cajun label may be a hot commodity today, but its origin is beyond popular marketing. As Cajuns become more educated, they choose to use this education to present an insider’s view of Cajun culture to the general public, and no place is this more vibrant than in the publication of contemporary Cajun literature. While this inside look revises previous literary representations by illustrating the inaccuracies proliferated by these earlier works, as represented in the California restaurant scene in Tim Gautreaux’s The Next Step in the Dance, it also demonstrates the degree to which such Americanization has to be acknowledged. Contemporary Cajun writing, including the work of Gautreaux, remains embedded in the Cajun past, usually in the period between 1920 and 1990.4 Cajuns faced their greatest challenges in this period, including the oil boom and bust and the invasion of Wal-Marts and fast-food restaurants. This backward glance illustrates how Cajuns and their daily lives have shifted toward American mainstream culture, but it also allows Cajun authors to revise the literary record of Cajun Americanization to include their own perspectives on this process. As American as Cajuns have become, they retain a Cajun identity...

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