91福利\u2019s Franco American Centre is offering a Curriculum Development Workshop on April 15, 2019 that is open to all UMS Faculty and Graduate Students.\u00a0Led by Libra Professor Mark Richard and Susan Pinette, Director of Franco American Programs, the workshop is intended to help participants who would like to integrate Franco content into their teaching and research. Participants will be reimbursed for travel and given a $250 stipend.<\/p>\n
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Composed of rural francophone settlements in northern Maine that date back to the eighteenth century, and communities of French Canadians who started immigrating to industrial New England towns in the late nineteenth century, Franco-Americans constitute the largest concentration of French speakers in the United States\u2014anywhere from 11% to 28% of state populations in the Northeast. Though a substantial presence, the \u201cFrench fact\u201d of New England is often overlooked and unheard.<\/p>\n
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The prevailing narrative of nineteenth-century immigration in many ways obscures the Franco-American experience. In the dominant American imaginary, the paradigm for white ethnicity is Ellis Island. Distinct from European immigrations, French-Canadian immigrants traveled overland to the United States. Their pattern of migration resembles the borderlands configuration most often associated with later movements of Mexican Americans. Attention to Franco America contextualizes Mexican migrations within a larger, continental view. Similarly, Franco America offers innovative insights into the role of language in immigrant communities. Within the context of Francophone globalization, the French language represents most often both a colonialist past and a ticket to global mobility. Franco-American communities typically understood French to be a determining mark of culture and one of the bulwarks against cultural assimilation.<\/p>\n
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The history of French-Canadian immigration combines characteristics that define both nineteenth-century European migrations and current borderlands Mexican movements. Borders were extremely fluid between New England and Canada (changing most recently in response to 9\/11), and citizenship remained a contested category within Franco-American populations for years (one in four migrants did not settle in the U.S.) French Canada saw itself at the heart of a French-speaking North American diaspora, formulating as part of its \u201cnational\u201d agenda ties to Franco-American communities, and many French-Canadian migrants based their identity on their ongoing links to Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois institutions. Franco-American elites, for example, sent their children to Qu\u00e9bec schools well into the 1950s. In the U.S., Franco-Americans faced deep-seated antagonism due to their willingness to accept low wages, their religion and their language (anti-Catholic and immigrant protests of the Know-Nothings in the 1880s-1890s and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s were common, and English-only laws remained in place in Maine until 1969). Questions of assimilation are complex as Franco-Americans built a large network of francophone parishes (lasting in large part until the 1960s) that preserved ethnic culture and at the same time helped parishioners to assimilate.<\/p>\n
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During this curriculum transformation workshop, Professor Richard will offer an overview of French-Canadian migration to the US, sources to help teach Franco American history within the frameworks of 19th-century migrations, industrialization, nativist anti-migration sentiment, and issues of assimilation. Professor Pinette will offer resources to teach Franco American literature within both Francophone\/French contexts and American literature. Both presenters are members of the Executive Board of the American Council for Qu\u00e9bec Studies and will share information on where to get financial resources to support research and teaching in Franco content areas.<\/p>\n
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Libra Professor Mark Richard is the foremost historian of Franco Americans today. He holds a PhD in history from Duke University and serves as Professor of History and Canadian Studies at SUNY-Plattsburgh.\u00a0His research focuses on French-Canadian migrations to the northeastern United States and, particularly, on the process by which French speakers have become integrated into U.S. society over historical time. He has published two peer-reviewed books: Loyal but French: The Negotiation of Identity by French-Canadian Descendants in the United States\u00a0<\/em>(2008) focuses on Lewiston, Maine, and explores how francophones often challenged, rejected, or redefined some of the norms of the host society; Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s\u00a0<\/em>(2015) extends its analysis to all of New England to explore how nativism, religious prejudice, and class differences led to the Ku Klux Klan\u2019s remarkable growth in New England during the twenties, a development virtually ignored by previous scholars. Susan Pinette holds a PhD in literature from University of California, Irvine and serves as the Director of Franco American Programs at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research examines contemporary Franco American literature, where she shows its significance to the broader arenas of North American Francophone communities and American Studies. She has published on Lahontan, Diderot, and Kerouac and is currently working on a book-length manuscript on Franco American fiction. In her work as Director, she has developed various curricula for Franco American Studies, received state and federal funding grants, and has served as a liaison between the academic community and the public.<\/p>\n Draft schedule of the workshop<\/p>\n To apply, please fill out this form<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
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