Anglo-French Relations and the Acadians in Canada’s Maritime Literature : Issues of Othering and Transculturation

Abstract

Anglo-French relations have had a significant influence on the fiction created in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. The 18th century was a period of colonial wars. Contacts between the English and French in Canada were established and determined by the hostilities between the two colonizing nations, France and Great Britain. The hostilities passed on a sense of difference between the two nations through situations of othering. Contacts, however, always generate transcultural processes which transcend or mediate cultural difference. Othering and transculturation are closely interdependent phenomena acting in conjunction. They work in processes manifesting themselves in so-called contact zones both during the colonial era and in a postcolonial context. This study investigates how processes of othering and transculturation are explored and discussed in a number of Maritime novels, Anglophone and Acadian, published in different decades of the 20th century, in order to account for a broad perspective of the interdependency of othering and transculturation. With the deportation of the Acadians in 1755 and the Peace Treaty of Paris in 1763, French and Acadian influence was eclipsed in the Maritime region until 1881 when the first National Acadian Convention took place. A new Acadie was born, without territory, and today Anglophone Maritime fiction and Acadian fiction narrate a co-existence and a cohabitation where the historical past is an important agent in contemporary society and its literary production.