Graduate School News and Events
Acadian, Cajun, American
Ryan André Brasseaux (American Studies) is on track to complete his Ph.D. within the next three years, but his first scholarly book has already been published and has received high praise.
Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (Oxford University Press 2009) is a social and cultural history of Cajun music, placing this little-studied style within the context of American popular music. Cajuns are the descendants of Acadian French Catholic settlers who were deported from Canada during the Seven Years’ War between the French and the British in the 1750s and 60s and who now live, primarily, in southern Louisiana.
“Brasseaux’s Cajun Breakdown is a lucid and compelling account of the survival of a people and their music against all odds. It’s hard to imagine there being a better book on the history of Cajun music,” says John Szwed, the John M. Musser Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of African American Studies at Yale.
The book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music through 1950, raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and the nature of American music itself. Despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty, Ryan argues, the Cajun community created a thoroughly American genre, blending European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing.
“The folkloric myth of purity and isolation dissolves before Ryan’s historical contextualization of the synchronicity of Cajun life and art with national and global trends,” notes Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale. “Cajun music changed over time and with the times. Its trans-Atlantic, French, Canadian, and southern roots lapped and twined into an American art form. The music becomes all the more original, adaptive, and brilliant when heard through his riveting depiction.”
Research for the book “began as an attempt to re-connect with the soundtrack of my youth,” Ryan says. “My mind’s ear can still hear the thin, processed sound of Cajun music broadcast by a local French-language am station in my maternal grandfather’s Chevrolet pickup truck as we traversed the gravel byways surrounding his home in rural south Louisiana. He annotated the broadcast with tales of dancing to Lawrence Walker, Harry Choates, and Iry LeJeune, yarns that both captured my imagination as a youth and sustained my interest throughout this project. Like my grandfather, I came of age sweating and dancing all night to the latest Cajun music in poorly ventilated south Louisiana dance halls. Indeed, my fascination with Cajun music stems directly from a personal crusade to better understand the world from whence I came.”
Ryan has served as a Cajun cultural expert for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, Associated Press, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, National Film Board of Canada, and the Food Network. He drafted a preliminary version of the manuscript as part of his M.A. in Anthropology at Louisiana State University, while working full time as director of research at a museum exhibit design firm.
“The book, however, only took shape after I arrived at Yale,” he says. “I circulated the manuscript among several American Studies faculty members and two history graduate students, Katherine Mooney and Joseph Fronczak, who generously gave insightful comments and critiques. Cajun Breakdown is a much better book because of the tremendous support and engagement I received from family, peers, and Yale’s faculty. To be sure, the book would not have been possible if it were not for my strongest support—my wife Jessika and our two children, Anne Elise (5) and Joseph Emile (3)—to whom the book is dedicated.
“The transformation from Master’s thesis to manuscript took place during my first two years of course work here at Yale. Meanwhile, I began to approach publishers. Oxford, Penn, and University of Illinois presses all courted the project.”
Ryan’s dissertation will focus on a related, but much broader topic: the politics of culture in French North America, with an emphasis on the interactions between Quebec, Acadian New Brunswick, Franco-American New England, and French Louisiana between 1885 and 1995.
“I argue that speaking French is a political act in North America. I focus on the ways in which international relationships between these disparate groups stimulate Francophone conceptualizations of democracy and resistance in the face of Anglophone hegemony.” His dissertation advisor is John Mack Faragher. Other committee members are Gilmore, Matthew Jacobson, and Jay Gitlin.
