“Locating in Third Space(s) : Franco-American Writers Re-defining their Hybrid Location”
Résumé
There exists in New England a group of American writers of French Canadian descent belonging to an almost invisible ethnic community, the Franco-Americans, children and grand-children of French Canadians who, from the late 19th century onward, came to fill the ranks of mills and shoeshop factories in the industrial centers of New England. Invisible are also the Franco-American writers are writing about this alter-identity at the margins, sometimes center, sometimes periphery. My paper embraces the different generations of contemporary Franco-American writers to see how despite their position as American-born writers they hardly situate themselves at the core of American society and its literary production. Their writings rather seem to redefine that space and constantly question that hybrid location inherent to American society by always trying to define a space of their own. Their position seems to translate ambivalence and sometimes loss. Their writings engage in a dialogue between belonging and exclusion, where negotiating one’s space seem to be vital. This dialectic of center(s) and margin(s) is all the more significant for this community who needs to define themselves and make sense of their multicultural way of life according to two centers: Canada (French Canada) and the USA. This paper discusses cultural representations, and the varied ways of dealing with 2nd, 3rd or even 4th generation ethnic identity. It focuses on the way they represent and inscribe their experience into a framed geographic space: New England.
This space and the linguistic and ethnic component they inscribe in it has come to define a third space that the New England Franco-American authors write about, struggle with thus questioning the very status of this minority ethnic literature (littérature de l’exiguité as François Paré, a French Canadian critic calls it) as well as the marginal, liminal space it fills or belongs to: Franco-American literature, regional literature, ethnic literature?
Eventually, for younger and older Franco-American authors writing either in French or/and in English, this third space previously defined also helps them evaluate, voice and reveal other marginal spaces they invest, and norms they have to negotiate as they question other norms (sexual, linguistic, cultural and literary).