Negotiating Difference in French Louisiana Music

Sara Le Menestrel, Paris, France, is a cultural anthropologist and a research fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. Her research interests include the anthropology of music and the anthropology of disaster through post-Katrina and post-Rita Louisiana. She is coeditor of Working the Field: Accounts from French Louisiana, also published by University Press of Mississippi.

Sara Le Menestrel’s Negotiating Difference in French Louisiana Music is a spirited, thoughtful, and often provocative study of South Louisiana music and dance culture, illuminating the profound variegation and cross-fertilization that animates it. For anyone interested in Louisiana’s cultural dynamics, this is essential reading."" - Bruce Boyd Raeburn, director of special collections and curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University""With great clarity and insight, Le Menestrel deftly negotiates the complex processes of identification and categorization of French Louisiana music, alive to the ambivalence and complexity that attend the judgments people make of value, authenticity, and legitimacy in relation to heavily loaded constructs such as Cajun and Creole. Cutting neatly through the thicket of current theoretical speculations about creolization, hybridity and métissage, Le Menestrel focuses on the way ideas about race, class, place, and historical origins create intersecting hierarchical registers of taste and value in music. Theoretically sophisticated, while also ethnographically and historically rich and many-hued, Le Menestrel’s book is a truly impressive achievement."" - Peter Wade, professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester and author of Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia<