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Some of the Black Creole women community members - the backbone of the Soileau community -- participate in specific traditions which reflect traditional gender-based roles and which assist in promoting and sustaining the importance of their rural community. Various tradition-based activities are passed on to certain women, who have attained their social status within the community based on experience and age. These traditions coincide with life stages as discussed in Arnold Van Gennep's book, Rites of Passage. Sacred activities based on life stages described in Rites of Passage expose individuals to what Victor Turner describes as "deep values" through group separation, a liminal period associated with reintegration into everyday life.
 | | Professor Larocque will use numerous slides to give a visual overview of the courir and introduce certain women performing their gender-based roles. |
The courir is an annual event that entails a band of costumed and plain-clothed community members, relatives, friends, neighbors and tourists traveling on horses, trucks and wagons to visit Black Creole members of the rural southern Soileau, Louisiana community to beg and dance for ingredients for the evening communal gumbo. The community-wide performance of courir de Mardi Gras reinforces cultural identity in the community of and generates communitas, what Robert Daly describes as a "sense of comradeship among equals….. from which identification of self with communal culture derives."
Monicque Larocque is a fourth-generation Franco-American born and raised in Vermont. Her maternal grandparents spoke and wrote quebecois. Madame Larocque is currently an Instructor of French at the University of Memphis and is writing her Ph.D. dissertation in Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She holds a Masters degree in French from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and a Bachelor's degree in French from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has presented topics related to her dissertation and Master's thesis at Louisiana Folklore Society conferences, at the American Council for Quebec Studies conference, at the International Cross-Cultural Communication conference, and at the American Folklore Society conference.
The public is invited to hear this fascinating, illustrated account
of the Black Creole women of Soileau, Louisiana by a scholar
who has dedicated her energies to their study.
For more information, contact Tom Mendina, University Libraries, The University of Memphis at 901-678-4310 or tmendina@memphis.edu.
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