Swapping Stories

Swapping Stories PDF Author: Carl Lindahl
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496800826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Here are more than two hundred oral tales from some of Louisiana's finest storytellers. In this comprehensive volume of great range are transcriptions of narratives in many genres, from diverse voices, and from all regions of the state. Told in settings ranging from the front porch to the festival stage, these tales proclaim the great vitality and variety of Louisiana's oral narrative traditions. Given special focus are Harold Talbert, Lonnie Gray, Bel Abbey, Ben Guiné, and Enola Matthews—whose wealth of imagination, memory, and artistry demonstrates the depth as well as the breadth of the storyteller's craft. For tales told in Cajun and Creole French, Koasati, and Spanish, the editors have supplied both the original language and English translation. To the volume Maida Owens has contributed an overview of Louisiana's folk culture and a survey of folklife studies of various regions of the state. Car Lindahl's introduction and notes discuss the various genres and styles of storytelling common in Louisiana and link them with the worldwide are of the folktale.

Swapping Stories

Swapping Stories PDF Author: Carl Lindahl
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496800826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Get Book Here

Book Description
Here are more than two hundred oral tales from some of Louisiana's finest storytellers. In this comprehensive volume of great range are transcriptions of narratives in many genres, from diverse voices, and from all regions of the state. Told in settings ranging from the front porch to the festival stage, these tales proclaim the great vitality and variety of Louisiana's oral narrative traditions. Given special focus are Harold Talbert, Lonnie Gray, Bel Abbey, Ben Guiné, and Enola Matthews—whose wealth of imagination, memory, and artistry demonstrates the depth as well as the breadth of the storyteller's craft. For tales told in Cajun and Creole French, Koasati, and Spanish, the editors have supplied both the original language and English translation. To the volume Maida Owens has contributed an overview of Louisiana's folk culture and a survey of folklife studies of various regions of the state. Car Lindahl's introduction and notes discuss the various genres and styles of storytelling common in Louisiana and link them with the worldwide are of the folktale.

Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans

Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans PDF Author: Jeanne deLavigne
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807152935
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
“He struck a match to look at his watch. In the flare of the light they saw a young woman just at Pitot’s elbow—a young woman dressed all in black, with pale gold hair, and a baby sleeping on her shoulder. She glided to the edge of the bridge and stepped noiselessly off into the black waters.”—from Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans Ghosts are said to wander along the rooftops above New Orleans’ Royal Street, the dead allegedly sing sacred songs in St. Louis Cathedral, and the graveyard tomb of a wealthy madam reportedly glows bright red at night. Local lore about such supernatural sightings, as curated by Jeanne deLavigne in her classic Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, finds the phantoms of bitter lovers, vengeful slaves, and menacing gypsies haunting nearly every corner of the city, from the streets of the French Quarter to Garden District mansions. Originally printed in 1944, all forty ghost stories and the macabre etchings of New Orleans artist Charles Richards appear in this new edition. Drawing largely on popular legend dating back to the 1800s, deLavigne provides vivid details of old New Orleans with a cast of spirits that represent the ethnic mélange of the city set amid period homes, historic neighborhoods, and forgotten taverns. Combining folklore, newspaper accounts, and deLavigne’s own voice, these phantasmal tales range from the tragic—brothers, lost at sea as children, haunt a chapel on Thomas Street in search of their mother—to graphic depictions of torture, mutilation, and death. Folklorist and foreword contributor Frank A. de Caro places the writer and her work in context for modern readers. He uncovers new information about deLavigne’s life and describes her book’s pervasive lingering influence on the Crescent City’s culture today.

Legendary Louisiana Outlaws

Legendary Louisiana Outlaws PDF Author: Keagan LeJeune
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807162582
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
From the infamous pirate Jean Laffite and the storied couple Bonnie and Clyde, to less familiar bandits like train-robber Eugene Bunch and suspected murderer Leather Britches Smith, Legendary Louisiana Outlaws explores Louisiana's most fascinating fugitives. In this entertaining volume, Keagan LeJeune draws from historical accounts and current folklore to examine the specific moments and legal climate that spawned these memorable characters. He shows how Laffite embodied Louisiana's shift from an entrenched French and Spanish legal system to an American one, and relates how the notorious groups like the West and Kimbrell Clan served as community leaders and law officers but covertly preyed on Louisiana's Neutral Strip residents until citizens took the law into their own hands. Likewise, the bootlegging Dunn brothers in Vinton, he explains, demonstrate folk justice's distinction between an acceptable criminal act (operating an illegal moonshine still) and an unacceptable one (cold-blooded murder). Recounting each outlaw's life, LeJeune also considers their motives for breaking the law as well as their attempts at evading capture. Running from authorities and trying to escape imprisonment or even death, these men and women often relied on the support of ordinary citizens, sympathetic in the face of oppressive and unfair laws. Through the lens of folk life, LeJeune's engaging narrative demonstrates how a justice system functions and changes and highlights Louisiana's particular challenges in adapting a system of law and order to work for everyone.

Juneteenth Texas

Juneteenth Texas PDF Author: Francis Edward Abernethy
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 9781574410181
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Juneteenth Texas reflects the many dimensions of African-American folklore. The personal essays are reminiscences about the past and are written from both black and white perspectives. They are followed by essays which classify and describe different aspects of African-American folk culture in Texas; studies of specific genres of folklore, such as songs and stories; studies of specific performers, such as Lightnin' Hopkins and Manse Lipscomb and of particular folklorists who were important in the collecting of African-American folklore, such as J. Mason Brewer; and a section giving resources for the further study of African Americans in Texas.

Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana

Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana PDF Author: Nathan Rabalais
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175579
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana’s remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how folk characters, motifs, and morals adapted to their new contexts in Louisiana. By viewing the state’s folklore in the light of its immigration history, he demonstrates how folktales can serve as indicators of sociocultural adaptation as well as contact among cultural communities. In particular, he examines the ways in which collective traumas experienced by Louisiana’s major ethnic groups—slavery, the grand dérangement, linguistic discrimination—resulted in fundamental changes in these folktales in relation to their European and African counterparts. Rabalais points to the development of an altered moral economy in Cajun and Creole folktales. Conventional heroic qualities, such as physical strength, are subverted in Louisiana folklore in favor of wit and cunning. Analyses of Black Creole animal tales like those of Bouki et Lapin and Tortie demonstrate the trickster hero’s ability to overcome both literal and symbolic entrapment through cleverness. Some elements of Louisiana’s folklore tradition, such as the rougarou and cauchemar, remain an integral presence in the state’s cultural landscape, apparent in humor, popular culture, regional branding, and children’s books. Through its adaptive use of folklore, French and Creole Louisiana will continue to retell old stories in innovative ways as well as create new stories for future generations.

The House That Sugarcane Built

The House That Sugarcane Built PDF Author: Donna McGee Onebane
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
The House That Sugarcane Built tells the saga of Jules M. Burguières Sr. and five generations of Louisianans who, after the Civil War, established a sugar empire that has survived into the present. When twenty-seven-year-old Parisian immigrant Eugène D. Burguières landed at the Port of New Orleans in 1831, one of the oldest Louisiana dynasties began. Seen through the lens of one family, this book traces the Burguières from seventeenth-century France, to nineteenth- century New Orleans and rural south Louisiana and into the twenty-first century. It is also a rich portrait of an American region that has retained its vibrant French culture. As the sweeping narrative of the clan unfolds, so does the story of their family-owned sugar business, the J. M. Burguières Company, as it plays a pivotal role in the expansion of the sugar industry in Louisiana, Florida, and Cuba. The French Burguières were visionaries who knew the value of land and its bountiful resources. The fertile soil along the bayous and wetlands of south Louisiana bestowed on them an abundance of sugarcane above its surface, and salt, oil, and gas beneath. Ever in pursuit of land, the Burguières expanded their holdings to include the vast swamps of the Florida Everglades; then, in 2004, they turned their sights to cattle ranches on the great frontier of west Texas. Finally, integral to the story are the complex dynamics and tensions inherent in this family-owned company, revealing both failures and victories in its history of more than 135 years. The J. M. Burguières Company's survival has depended upon each generation safeguarding and nourishing a legacy for the next.

Creole Folk Tales

Creole Folk Tales PDF Author: Hewitt Leonard Ballowe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cajuns
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description


Downtown Mardi Gras

Downtown Mardi Gras PDF Author: Leslie A. Wade
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496823796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell, we ARE Mardi Gras." Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural studies, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

Louisiana Folklife

Louisiana Folklife PDF Author: Nicholas R. Spitzer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description


Out of the Shadow of Leprosy

Out of the Shadow of Leprosy PDF Author: Claire Manes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617037761
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In 1924 when thirty-two-year-old Edmond Landry kissed his family good-bye and left for the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, leprosy, now referred to as Hansen's Disease, stigmatized and disfigured but did not kill. Those with leprosy were incarcerated in the federal hospital and isolated from family and community. Phones were unavailable, transportation was precarious, and fear was rampant. Edmond entered the hospital (as did his four other siblings), but he did not surrender to his fate. He fought with his pen and his limited energy to stay connected to his family and to improve living conditions for himself and other patients. Claire Manes, Edmond's granddaughter, lived much of her life gripped by the silence surrounding her grandfather. When his letters were discovered, she became inspired to tell his story through her scholarship and his writing. Out of the Shadow of Leprosy: The Carville Letters and Stories of the Landry Family presents her grandfather's letters and her own studies of narrative and Carville during much of the twentieth century. The book becomes a testament to Edmond's determination to maintain autonomy and dignity in the land of the living dead. Letters and stories of the other four siblings further enhance the picture of life in Carville from 1919 to 1977.