In the 20th century, the Acadian community worked hard to establish a national identity. Easily recognized and assimilated icons have been adopted. Évangéline, fiddle music, and Acadian flags are incorporated as comfortable solutions to fundamentally complex problems of identity. « Alma » proposes a new version of the Acadian cultural experience, one that considers the binary nationalist construction of Acadie as an over-simplification of an otherwise fascinating example of inclusiveness and acculturation.

The author proposes a new kind of literary performance that more effectively reflects the hybrid nature of her own cultural and linguistic identity. This literary performance is based in extensive fieldwork, oral culture, and history of South-Western Nova Scotia's Acadian region, la Baie Sainte-Marie. « Alma » is composed of a critical introduction and a corpus of poems, which the author proposes as a twentieth century epic novel, constructing the Acadian nation in text.