Performing Family Stories, Forming Cultural Identity: Franco American Memere Stories
Author(s)
Langellier, Kristin M.
Abstract
Family stories participate in the formation of culture as they imagine and reproduce ethnic identity. This essay examines grandmother (memere) stories in Franco American families as the cultural location of a global moment where family, white ethnic identity, and gender intersect. Within a transnational feminism and performative theory of family storytelling which historicize and situate cultural texts, grandmothers become linked with the motherland and mother tongue in the imagination of Franco American identity. The analysis of a corpus of memere stories identifies both the performative agency and constraints on traditional ethnic women within structures of gender, culture, and power. The performance of memere stories enchants the grandmother as a cultural icon and reproduces the Franco American family. However, the formation of cultural identity through family storytelling in memere stories is a problematic achievement because it is built upon myths of cultural purity and “goodness,” although narrative strategies complicate these images.
