The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America

G.A. Rawlyk is a history professor at Queen’s University and the
author of Champions of the Truth: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and the
Maritime Baptists.

This is a disappointing book at almost every level. It is poorly produced, inadequately bound, carelessly edited. And, moreover, like so many collections of essays, it is one of very uneven quality. A surprising number of the essays are awkwardly written, superficially researched, and poorly organized. A few do make scholarly contributions, but even these often have some limitations. The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America, in my view, adds little to historical scholarship and raises certain disconcerting questions about what the Multicultural History Society of Ontario is actually trying to accomplish.

There are 13 essays in this volume. The first section, entitled “Quebec and Acadia as Sources of Emigration,” consists of two all-too-brief articles: Jean Daigle’s “The Acadians: A People in Search of a Country” and P.M. Hayne’s “Emigration and Colonization: Twin Themes in Nineteenth-Century French Canadian Literature.” Section Two, “The Acadians and Quebecois in the United States,” has two interesting studies, one by Frances H. Early, “The Rise and Fall of Felix Albert: Some Reflections on the Aspirations of Habitant Immigrants to Lowell, Massachusetts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” and the other by G.L. Gold, “Language and Ethnic Identity in South Louisiana: Implications of Data from Mamou Prairie.” The final two sections of the volume are concerned with the French in the west and Ontario. With the possible exception of Charles Castonguay’s “The Decline of French as Home Language in the Quebec and Acadian Diaspora of Canada and the United States” and D. Cartwright’s “Spatial Patterns in Franco-Ontarian Communities,” the articles in these two sections are not suitable for publication in a scholarly volume.

There is no index.