Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles J. Stivale is Professor of French at Wayne State University. He is the author of several books including The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations.

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"Charles J. Stivale has a unique ability to bring together his deep and fluent understanding of Deleuzean theory with his passion and enthusiasm for Cajun music. It's not an obvious combination of elements, but Stivale pulls it off with grace and skill. I attribute that to the clear way that his love for the diverse ingredients of this scholarly gumbo shines through his prose."--Gilbert B. Rodman, author of "Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend"

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Disenchanting Les Bons Temps

Duke University Press

Chapter One

In the same way [as a body], a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownesses of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythm.-Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

During an all too brief four-year period in the mid-to-late 1980s, I began to devote myself actively to the truly pleasurable pursuits of "becoming-Cajun," a "Cajun-by-choice" as many native and nonnative Louisianans are often inclined to say. This pursuit was an avocation born of a happy coincidence of geography (living in New Orleans), personal interests (a desire to become familiar with the region's folk practices and culture), and personal encounters with a diverse group of Cajun dance and music acionados. Subsequently, despite a job-related move to Detroit, I refused to let go of the rewarding activities and enriching friendships that becoming-Cajun had afforded. Thus, from 1990 onward, I developed a scholarly project that has allowed me to pursue and enjoy Cajun dance and music as well as the many friendships that have grown from this pursuit. In this chapter, I reflect on the circumstances that led me to this project on Cajun dance and music spaces and practices. The chapter also provides an opportunity to consider the difficulties-personal, scholarly, and theoretical-that have arisen in pursuing this project and thereby allow me to clarify certain problems pertaining to the current institutional and disciplinary conjuncture.

Through this reflection on the relation between the personal and the scholarly, I want to emphasize something important that tends to disappear all too often in such discussions and publications-namely, the experiences of personal pleasure that originally inspire research, the experiences of reflection that propel the research forward, and, yes, the doubts that often require one to redirect a project partially or entirely in order to continue. Hence, my use of the personal is a strategic trajectory for considering the motivations and professional choices that have contributed to developing an ongoing critical project, as well as for exploring my in-between status as scholar and participant/observer in relation to the dance and music arena that I discuss. This exploration also examines how the personal, the pleasurable, and the reflective often encounter tensions and even certain forms of conflict when linked to a "disciplinary" domain. Given that cultural studies has become victim of its own success, I begin by tracing a particular example of how "cultural studies travels" (Grossberg 1997b, 343-44; see also Grossberg 1996a) both geographically within a life and disciplinarily in relation to something that has come to be known as French cultural studies. In tracing this trajectory, I also consider ways in which a particular theoretical engagement-in my case, an engagement with works by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari-might over complementary, practical lines of "becoming" in relation to contemporary events, problems, debates, and cultural practices.

Personal Steps

After moving to Louisiana in 1986 to teach French at Tulane University, I slowly adapted to the many manifestations of New Orleans music culture, and I revised a series of misconceptions about the varieties of New Orleans music as distinct from Cajun musical expression (see Hannusch 1985). I learned, for example, that whereas the French origins of New Orleans were based on aristocratic and imperial fiats for gradual urban development, the introduction of the exiles acadiens (Acadians exiled by the British from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in 1755) into Louisiana occurred fairly quickly in the mid-to-late eighteenth century through a deliberate process of rural resettlement toward the bayous west of New Orleans and even further west beyond the Atchafalaya Basin in the swamps and on the prairies of southwestern Louisiana (see Brasseaux 1987, 1991, and 1992). I also learned of the many difficulties that rural Cajuns suffered in terms of the increasing Americanization of Louisiana society throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly with the 1921 constitutional interdiction on offering instruction in French in the public schools (see Dormon 1983, 68-71).

Early on, I began to perceive the implicit political impact of Cajun sounds within the New Orleans context. For example, the weekly Cajun music hours in Cajun French, transmitted on one or two local New Orleans radio stations, challenged the hegemony both of English and of the blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz-based idioms that dominate New Orleans musical sounds. In fact, these shows occasionally included specific references to the repression of Cajun identity that occurred throughout much of the twentieth century. These deliberate interventions constituted a musical and linguistic challenge to the more "refined" sensibilities both of the New Orleans French language tradition and of the community's fairly insular cultural practices. Initially, however, I hesitated to venture into the pays inconnus (unknown countries) of the bar and music scene without having some familiarity with the social protocols, indeed the social "languages," spoken there. Although I now see this hesitation as a fairly normal function of a certain culture shock, I correctly intuited something special about the Cajun music and dance scene that I would soon better understand.

Having studied the works of Deleuze and Guattari for a number of years, I found the New Orleans social context all the more important both for my experiences therein and for subsequent critical reflections. Most evidently, questions both of "minor language" and of "territorialization" gradually became apparent through the extreme complexity of socio-cultural relations in south Louisiana (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 1987). As an outsider learning to negotiate various cultural milieus, I began to distinguish how French language, already "minor" in relation to the dominant English surrounding it, could itself be de- and reterritorialized. That is, Cajun French in Louisiana has always been something of a poor cousin in relation to the New Orleans French language with its origins in the French aristocracy (see Ancelet 1988; Phillips 1983). La langue cadjine, as it is sometimes known, suffered the same fate as the Acadian settlers themselves, first deterritorialized through exile and physical displacement and then linguistically through the language's evolution over two centuries and its growing distinction from a "major" French as well as the territorializing dominance of American English.

Yet in recent years the Cajun cultural renaissance and Cajun music's commercialization (in advertising and films as well as through recordings) have served to reterritorialize la langue cadjine: on the one hand, the mix of Cajun and Louisiana representations is often quite distorted and the language itself still remains incomprehensible within American mass...