Disenchanting Les Bons Temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun Music and Dance (review)

Disenchanting “Les Bons Temps” is an elegant riddle that stands above a book that takes up Cajun music and tells the story of the author’s immersion into its ambient culture. The book accomplishes two principal tasks. It brings Cajun music into the growing field of cultural studies, a discipline, neither fish nor fowl, that marries theories based on total social facts—facts that determine the patterns, orders, and events of history—to sociology. Not anthropology, yet nonetheless a human science, cultural studies cuts a path between synchronic analysis of social groups and treatment of conceptual formations that determine how people live their lives. [End Page 165]

In order to mobilize his arguments Stivale draws extensively on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A first chapter is autobiographical, explaining how the author became involved in Cajun music and how its own regional character inspires reflection on the subjectivity in local and global spheres: To what degree does Cajun music “invent its own public” and refuse to move outside of its own time and space? The question is addressed in the second chapter, in which Stivale takes up the clichés of “an ebulliently Cajun way of life” through an account of the migration of the culture from Northeastern America to Louisiana. A close reading of Zachary Richard’s music (Voyage de nuit and Faire récolte) shows how stereotypes are used in performative and musical expression for the ends of creative variation. In the third chapter Stivale looks at films on Cajun life that move between stereotype and chronicle. He takes care to note how the directors negotiate their own attraction to the culture while displaying their own commercial motivations. A compelling chapter on the haeccity and quiddity—the “thisness”or “thatness”—of the musical performances determines how, for participants, sensation, movement, and affect conspire to produce “events” in the strong philosophical sense of the term.