by Chantal Richard

The following is part one of a two-part blog post. It is inspired from a paper I gave on 4 May 2018, at the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference in Wolfville, very close to historic Grand-Pré, the symbolic epicenter of the Expulsion of an estimated 11, 000 Acadians from 1755 to 1758. [1] This research was made possible by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

In our age of cultural awareness and inclusivity, we know that words matter. They have always mattered, even – or perhaps especially – in an era when most educated people studied rhetoric as part of a liberal arts degree. The portrayal of a minority group by a social majority is not innocent, and can leave lasting stereotypes and prejudices in a society. In this brief summary of a more extensive ongoing analysis, I will examine how…