Putting Cajuns on the Map: Music's Role in Popularizing Louisiana's Bayou Culture
Southern Louisiana witnessed a grassroots Cajun cultural revival whose most active years stretched across three decades in the latter half of the twentieth century. While important local and world events created conditions favorable to its development, actors and events within the Cajun musical sphere specifically, and the establishment and use of iconography within that sphere, played integral roles in sustaining the Cajun renaissance into the 1980s. Activist efforts that recast long-held negative tropes about Cajun culture ensured modern-day Cajuns had access not only to cultural traditions but to the same spaces created to help keep those traditions alive. While those efforts took place across broadly diversified fields, cultural activism accomplished specifically within the Cajun musical realm produced avenues for the mass of ordinary Cajuns to acknowledge, celebrate, and ultimately commodify culturally authentic signifiers, which was of central importance to sustain a renewed cultural pride.
Music, Cajun, Louisiana, Acadiana, Iconography, Culture, Folk, Authenticity, Lomax, Festival Acadiens, Cultural History
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