The Effects of the Congrès mondial acadien 2014 on la grande Acadie

Abstract

This article analyzes Acadie's most celebrated organization, the World Acadian Congress, a civil society platform established over 20 years ago as a means of building bridges between Acadians from around the world. Despite the most recent attempt in 2014 to promote Acadie in a manner that would stimulate community building through economic cooperation, I argue that, in scholarship primarily, the congress is (naturally) a product of the history of the New Brunswick Acadian national ideology and that despite an idealistic desire to embrace a movement of cultural change that would see all diasporic Acadians in social agreement, the organization continues to rest on the modernizing ideology in a manner that benefits chiefly the Acadian territorial/hegemonic beacon of New Brunswick. To counter this natural, yet hegemonic, trend, I follow the call of certain Acadian elites by proposing that scholarship in Acadian studies leads the way by diversifying itself to include more expanded representation of la grande Acadie (the full diaspora) so that Acadians and Acadian enthusiasts may better understand their role and options in the new economy and establish educational institutions more firmly within the debate platform of Acadie as a civil society.