Michiganaise

Reimagining French-speaking Michigan as a vital crossroads for the global Francophone community.

An interdisciplinary exploration of Michigan's Francophone community and its history, this book blends literary analysis, archival research, cultural history, and personal narrative to arrive at a new understanding of the French-speaking American population. Situated at the crossroads of the Great Lakes, Michigan emerges as a vital yet often overlooked place where French-speaking settlers with roots in Quebec and Acadia, Indigenous nations, and later immigrants--those arriving in waves throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries--developed a unique Francophone cultural identity in confluence with other identities in Michigan and beyond. Claire-Marie Brisson weaves this history with her own family's story, establishing "Michiganaise" as a conceptual framework for understanding layered identities shaped by language, migration, and geography. With an original perspective and distinct voice, Michiganaise recovers a neglected history and proposes new ways of thinking about how migration, colonialism, displacement, and diaspora have shaped the Great Lakes and the French speakers that continue to call this region home.