| Abstract | This series of four essays works with the themes of identity, history, and alterity. "It's Not Your Fault, Marie Antoinette" chronicles my adventures during my trip to France and how the sites I visited relate to my knowledge and understanding of the French Revolution. This essay deals with how one interprets history and how history is alive. "Facebook for Dead People" addresses identity, heritage, and sense of belonging. This essay discusses how people form notions of ethnicity and patrimony including DNA, genealogy, and homeland as well as detailing my own experiences with heritage and genealogy. "I'd Like to Talk to You About Jesus" recounts my experiences growing up in the South as a Unitarian Universalist. My town was primarily white and Southern Baptist, so my religion set me apart from my friends and peers, who did not always take kindly to my not being Christian. This essay grapples with feelings and notions of alterity, judgment and condemnation, acceptance and tolerance, and faith and spirituality. Lastly, "Acadian, Cadien, Cajun" uses two texts, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, to discuss the Cajun identity after the Acadian exile. I intertwine this history of the Cajuns with my own experiences in Cajun Country and New Orleans, Louisiana. |
