Browse Items (6 total)
-
Performing Family Stories, Forming Cultural Identity : Franco American Mémière Stories
Performance studies essay on Franco American grandmothers and the formation of cultural identity through storytelling. Written by Mark and Marcia Bailey Professor at the University of Maine and co-author of "Storytelling in Daily Life" (Temple University Press, 2004). -
"Somebody's Got to Pick Eggs" : Family Storytelling About Work
Article in performance studies exploring the ways in which "family storytelling" performs, addresses, and complicates cultural markers among and between family members. How ideas of race, class, gender, and sexuality appear in family storytelling, especially as such stories approach the topic of work. Study focuses mainly on a conversation between the author-interviewer and the Gagnons: a large, working-class, Franco American family in rural Maine. -
Talking Acadian : Communication, Work, and Culture
A case study in intercultural communication, with linguistic and psychological insight into the dynamics of an American Acadian community in Gardner, Massachusetts. Large emphasis on the communal value of work, or how ideas about work are situated in the grammar of Acadian American dialogue. From YBK Publishers: " 'Talking Acadian: Communication, Work and Culture' provides a look into the lives of the French-speaking American Acadians, and particularly those who left eastern Canada to settle in Masschusetts in the 1960s. This book captures their stories about family life and their values, mores and morals. It also traces the ways that they use communication to develop and maintain their culture.What the reader learns is that to talk about Acadians you must talk about work. This group gives us new insights into the world of work - a central feature of living for the Acadians and crucial to their self-definition."Tags Acadians, Community: Customs and Social Life, Criticism and Review, Family, Folklore, France, Gardner MA, Labor History, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Brunswick, New England, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- Anthropology, Nonfiction -- Language and Linguistics, Nonfiction -- Performance Studies, Nonfiction -- Psychology, Nonfiction -- Social Sciences, Nova Scotia, Personal History: Biography and Oral History, Religion, Salem MA, Sports and Leisure -
Storytelling in Daily Life : Performing Narrative
Performance studies theory text. Maine Franco American case studies in a discussion of the methods and forms of storytelling. Written by two University of Maine professors. From Temple University Press: "The authors ably guide readers through the complex world of performing narrative. Along the way they show the embodied contexts of storytelling, the material constraints on narrative performances, and the myriad ways storytelling orders information and tasks, constitutes meanings, and positions speaking subjects. Readers will also learn that narrative performance is consequential as well as pervasive, as storytelling opens up experience and identities to legitimization and critique. The authors' multi-leveled model of strategy and tactics considers how relations of power in a system are produced, reproduced, and altered in performing narrative....The authors explain this strategic model through an extended discussion of family storytelling, using Franco Americans in Maine as their exemplar. They explore what stories families tell, how they tell them, and how storytelling creates family identities. Then, they show the range and reach of this strategic model by examining storytelling in diverse contexts: a breast cancer narrative, a weblog on the Internet, and an autobiographical performance on the public stage. Readers are left with a clear understanding of how and why the performance of narrative is the primary communicative practice shaping our lives today."Tags Acculturation and Assimilation, Bangor ME, Criticism and Review, Ethnicity and Collective Identity, Family, Gender and Sexuality, Language and Linguistics, Lewiston ME, Maine, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- Performance Studies, Old Town ME, Performing Arts, Personal History: Biography and Oral History, St. John River Valley -
Communicating Ethnic and Cultural Identity
Reader in ethnic studies. Critical approaches to ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and group identity in the United States, and the various ways they are manifest. Includes an essay by University of Maine scholar Kristin Langellier entitled, "'Where I Come From Is Where I Want To Be:' Communicating Franco-American Ethnicity." -
The Politics of Personal Narrative Methodology
Performance studies theory essay that explores in specific an interview with a Franco-American woman in Maine. From Peterson and Langellier: "Any study of personal narrative involves researchers and performers in contested, hence political, concerns of context and power. These concerns tend to be obscured methodologically by three commonplace assumptions: personal narrative is a text, personal narrative can be fully transcribed and analyzed, and personal narrative is not performance. This essay examines these assumptions and illustrates their methodological implications with an excerpt from an interview narrative with a breast cancer survivor."