Undercover Brother

I believe I mentioned earlier that I've been reading a book about Celine Dion, Canadian rock critic Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. I am enthralled by the text, which addresses (among other things) the American inability to read Quebecois signifiers. Wilson uses the term negres blancs, a commonly understood (though slightly scandalous) descriptor for the French Colonial stepchildren of Eastern Canada, like Celine, famously one of fourteen Catholic pauper babies from Charlemagne, a humdrum francophone hamlet where les Diones leased a wine bar with brood acting as waitstaff and Osmond-ish stage show. The phrase is applied to the above, quite famous post-Katrina Larry King segment--

". . . [there is] intense identification with New Orleans, which Quebec sees as both a cautionary tale of language loss and a distant cousin outpost of joie de vivre in stiff-necked North America. She shrugged off the million bucks as the least a happy entrepreneur could do, and sang when called upon like the dutiful national daughter ever ready to put her gifts into service. Because most viewers couldn't see the link between the negres blancs of Quebec and the creole blacks of New Orleans, Celine's state seemed out of all proportion."

hmmmm . . .