Cajun Identity Through Food: Between the Exotic "Other" and the White Culinary Imaginary

Laissez les bon temps rouler! Let the good times roll!

I have many wonderful childhood memories of Cajun family get-togethers in Louisiana. Despite this, I always resented the fact that I was Cajun and from the deep South. As a child, I did not appreciate my unique culture (or that it was relatively different from other US regions) in the way that I do now. I had internalized the same negative stereotypes about Cajun culture as did the outside world. I thought that Cajun accents sounded unintelligent and that most Cajuns were lazy and simple-minded. Like so many other Cajun people, I also grew up in an environment steeped in particular racial ideologies, another aspect of Cajun culture that I attribute to ignorance. Once I left Louisiana, I was embarrassed if anyone detected the Southern accent I so arduously tried to modify. I desperately attempted to distance myself from being Cajun. However, I now cherish many of the aspects of Cajun culture that I took for granted, like the music and language; not until I lived away from home for a few years was I able to gain a better understanding and a fresher outlook on the Cajun culture that I now hold dear. The tensions that I continue to grapple with are rooted in the contradictions between nostalgia, internalized perceptions about Cajun culture, and the racialized ideology associated with Cajun identity.

Cajun cuisine is often imagined as the embodiment of Cajun culture and is illustrated by food descriptions used to characterize this identity. Cajun identity cannot be reduced to or separated from specific food practices. Many anthropologists contend that the construction of an ethnic identity encompasses a number of "cultural, structural, symbolic and psychological dimensions" (Henry and Bankston, "Ethnic Self-Identification" 1020) which include but are not limited to: linguistic awareness, religious practices, familial values, and cultural norms associated with such ethnic identity (Keefe 36). Through depictions of festivities and cuisine in media and tourism, Cajun culture is often perceived from the outside as vibrant and robust, but it is also accompanied by pejorative stereotypes categorizing Cajuns as simple, "backwards," and uneducated. In this essay, I argue that Cajun identity via food occupies a liminal space between the exotic "Other" and the white culinary imaginary. While Cajun people have historically been racialized in a precarious position between whiteness and Otherness, I explore how they have adamantly categorized themselves in alignment with whiteness.

Expanding on Charles Taylor's concept of the social imaginary and Sandra M. Gilbert's notion of the culinary imagination, I define the white culinary imaginary in terms of how it functions to delineate and maintain standards of whiteness in terms of the appropriateness of food. This concept grounds the ways that people collectively imagine and manage expectations concerning which foods are edible and thus acceptable, and how social positionalities exist in relation to different types of foods. The white culinary imaginary reflects and informs societal myths about "respectable" ways of being that signal the whiteness of moral, political, and cultural norms. Because Cajun identity is inextricably intertwined with Cajun foodways, I examine the significance of class status as it is reflected in perceptions of Cajun cuisine. Specifically, the Cajun culinary tradition is both celebrated and reviled in different contexts. While Cajun culture is often commodified for being unique and rich, it is also depicted through popular culture as alien and dangerous. I will also consider the ways in which racism within Cajun culture functions to align Cajun identity with whiteness, despite its conflict with the white culinary imaginary.

I separate this paper into three sections: 1) my personal narrative as a Cajun individual as a way to position myself within the scholarship, 2) the history of Cajun identity through food, and 3) how Cajun cuisine is constructed both as the exotic Other while simultaneously maintaining its space within the white culinary imaginary and thus on the side of whiteness.

Personal Background

Growing up in Opelousas, Louisiana, most of my favorite memories include huge family gatherings where my siblings, cousins, and I would play outside...