France-Florida Research Institute

a talk by Serge Dupuis, Postdoctoral Fellow, CEFAN, Université Laval (Québec City, Canada)

Wednesday 30 March 2016, 3 p.m., (Dauer 215)

This conference will summarize the sociology of North American Francophone communities in order to better understand the position of French Canadians, as well as other Francophones in Florida, on the community-language axis. Whereas settlers, immigrants and descendents tended to integrate rapidly into Floridian society, tourists were seldom affected by their sojorn, other than through the acquisition of certain traits of American consumerism. In fact, snowbirds are the ones who have sought to reconstitute microcosms of French Canadian societies with associations, neighbourhoods, and French mass, but only during the Winter season. This presentation will also allude to other Florida Francophones (French and Haitian migrants for the most part) with which French Canadians are developing relations in French-language commercial, journalistic and medical spaces. However, these links remain too fragmentary to establish institutions that can transmit culture, such as French-language schools, which have traditionally been established in regions where French-speakers have settled in large numbers.

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Originally from Sudbury (Ontario, Canada), Serge Dupuis is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at the Chaire pour le développement de la recherche sur la culture d’expression française en Amérique du Nord (CEFAN) at Quebec City’s Université Laval. His research interests include the histories of the relationship between Quebec and North American Francophone minorities, the Francophonie movement, French-language education in Ontario, as well as French Canadians in Florida. His masters thesis has been expanded and become his first monograph. Plus peur de l’hiver que du Diable : une histoire des Canadiens français en Floride has just been published (Éditions Prise de parole, February 2016, 197 p.)