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French

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2268/91301

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The War of Sécession and the “race” of speeches: Language appointments and representations in the French-speaking French-language press in the late 19th century

Abstract

The War of Sécession has led to a reconfiguration of social, economic and political relations in the southern states. In Louisiane, the fear of insurgency of slaves freed by abolition, as well as their integration into the political class and the wolf economic dynamics during the period of Reconstruction (1867-1877), led some groups to favour new alliances based on skin colour, concealing old rivalries. This was the case for New Orleans’ Creoles who ignored their clashes with the “Americans” and were in favour of excluding Colour Creoles, which had hitherto been tolerated. The distancing established from that moment through the nomination between white and Colour Creoles is indicative of this “race” of social relations and the rhetoric that embody them. In order to address these changes of identity, we are considering the study of the French-speaking French-language press for the time, and, in particular, of the linguistic representations it conveys. The question of the place of the language is indeed central to the redefinition of the French-speaking and creole identity. Our study is part of the analysis of the speech, which seeks, on the one hand, to ‘report texts, through their wording, to the social places that make them possible’ (Maingueneau 2009: (19) and, second, to show how these texts make these places possible by constructing them in turn. We focus more specifically on the study of appointment, which seems to us to be particularly relevant in a context where names are subject to controversy which clearly illustrate the circulation of speeches (in the press but also in the socio-economic, political or religious spheres) and where ‘linguistic, political and ideological arguments overstate the meaning of a name, draw it, or even tear, between the alleged precision of a scientific category and the emotional imprecision of its invocation in political or ideological discourse’ (Tabouret-Keller 1997: 18). The special case of the Creative Community of New Orléans shows that ‘it is only in the act of naming an identity, defining an identity, or Stereotyping an identity that identity emerges as a concrete reality’ (Dominguez 1986: 266).

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