Acadie’s existence has long been debated. This article analyzes the ideological discourse of New Brunswick francophones in an effort to elucidate what is understood by the term Acadie. The author presents three Acadian discourse periods and a typological framework that have served to define Acadie in academic literature. Focussing on data collected as part of a larger project on Acadian identity, the author validates this framework through qualitative analyses, proving the existence of ideological diversity in that province that led francophones to interpret the term Acadie differently. The author concludes by postulating that Acadie is perhaps best understood as a co-linguistic community located within the Maritime provinces whose founding members are francophones and whose heritage can be traced back to the 1755 Expulsion.

This article analyzes Acadie's most celebrated organization, the World Acadian Congress, a civil society platform established over 20 years ago as a means of building bridges between Acadians from around the world. Despite the most recent attempt in 2014 to promote Acadie in a manner that would stimulate community building through economic cooperation, I argue that, in scholarship primarily, the congress is (naturally) a product of the history of the New Brunswick Acadian national ideology and that despite an idealistic desire to embrace a movement of cultural change that would see all diasporic Acadians in social agreement, the organization continues to rest on the modernizing ideology in a manner that benefits chiefly the Acadian territorial/hegemonic beacon of New Brunswick. To counter this natural, yet hegemonic, trend, I follow the call of certain Acadian elites by proposing that scholarship in Acadian studies leads the way by diversifying itself to include more expanded representation of la grande Acadie (the full diaspora) so that Acadians and Acadian enthusiasts may better understand their role and options in the new economy and establish educational institutions more firmly within the debate platform of Acadie as a civil society.

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Book Reviewsand Canada to move forward with Confederation (social welfare benefits and removing the uncertainty of civil aviation, defence and trade respectively) and how that relationship developed over time. Inventing Atlantic Canada fills the gap about how the Maritimes' political and economic elite viewed the coming Confederation, revealing the artificial origins of the regional relationship and its evolution into a more practical and coherent union after 1949.