| This dissertation sets out to examine what the long tail of cultural revival looks like after several decades. Though in the 1960s, it looked like Cajun music was disappearing, a revival led by musicians and scholars had, by the 1980s, created both a local and national market for Cajun music. Heritage tourism grew to become the region's second largest economic industry and the parallel processes of musical revival and tourism marketing have sustained the initial wave of interest in Cajun music for decades. Revival has become not a passing moment of inspiration or a drive to preserve, but instead an enduring legacy of discourses and social norms that reframe Cajun music as explicitly traditional---a genre of music with boundaries, idioms, and performance practices rooted in the past. I trace the shifting rhetoric of Cajun pride away from appeals to identity, ethnicity, and belonging and toward a linguistic emphasis on region, artistry, and affinity. This developing community of preference is subtly replacing older networks of kinship and genealogy and provides a more stable base of support for musicians and local businesses. In the first half of my dissertation, I examine in detail this affinity community that makes up the Cajun folk music and revival scene. I look at interactions between tourists and locals that challenge simple notions of insiders and outsiders, and spend time exploring negotiations of musical ownership and control of cultural processes. For the musicians mostly excluded from the emerging affinity-based community, however, the ways in which power and privilege have played a role in defining the post-revival Cajun music scene are visible. In the second half of my dissertation, I turn to the effects of the revival on the social stratification of Louisiana---those whose musical products have been excluded or minimized by the processes of revival. By highlighting these spaces of exclusion, I complicate the narrative of the ways in which revival functions. It does not offer its opportunities for growth and mobility universally. |
