Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
The Paradox of Authenticity in
a Globalized World
Edited by
Russell Cobb
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
THE PARADOX OF AUTHENTICITY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD
Copyright © Russell Cobb, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–35382–5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
CH A P T ER
1
Introduction: The Artif ice of
Authenticity in the Age of
Digital Reproduction
Russell Cobb
Like many people who live a great deal of their professional and social
lives online, I used to regard the notion of authenticity as hopelessly
old-fashioned, self-delusional even. As James Block remarks in this volume, we now live in the “age of the copy,” an era that, on the face of
it, seems to promise a democratization of all forms of culture. As entire
libraries of music and literature went online in the early twenty-first
century, it seemed to me that only Luddites would fetishize authentic
artifacts such as paper books, vinyl albums, and photographic prints.
After all, the very word “authenticity” is only a few linguistic paces
removed from the word “authoritarian,” and both words conjure up the
idea of a single authority who imposes a master narrative of meaning.
Rejecting authenticity, then, would seem to be a liberation from both
the physical shackles of the real object and from the ideological controls of meaning. Jettisoning the ideas behind authenticity would seem
to further the disappearance of the “aura” of the original, something
Walter Benjamin famously noted in “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.”1
Indeed, our current age of digital reproduction seems to invalidate
the root of authenticity, the Ancient Greek notion of authentikos, connoting both the idea of an original, authoritative text as well as authority over something or someone. In our era of digital reproduction, the
authoritative album has been replaced by the personally curated playlist;
a digitized pdf replaces the book in a library. Because these digital copies
are cheaper—if not free—and more convenient, few people (other than
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
2
RUSSELL COBB
companies that lose money off digital reproduction) bemoan their infinite replication. In recent years, some prominent literary figures have
celebrated this loss of the authoritative original as a liberation from capitalist controls over copyright (an issue taken up by Kaja Marczewska in
her essay on the controversial novelists Michel Houllebecq and Helene
Hegemann—both accused of plagiarism—later in this volume).
However, something strange has been occurring over the past decade
or so. Despite decades of postmodern critique and the digital turn of the
humanities more generally, I am surrounded by the rhetoric of authenticity. My breakfast yogurt proclaims itself to be “authentic Greek yogurt.”
I drive by an “authentic Indian restaurant” in a western Canadian strip
mall on my way to work. We are besieged by claims of authenticity from
retailers of all kinds: clothing stores, bookstores, supermarkets; all are
selling the idea of authentikos —a pure, authoritative, original product,
whether it be a Peruvian sweater, a memoir of drug abuse, or a Malbec
wine from Argentina. Even the 2012 US presidential election became a
debate about authenticity. Washington Post reporter Dan Balz noted that
authenticity—not ideology—was the main obstacle to Mitt Romney’s
connection with conservative voters:
Over the course of this presidential campaign, there has been one consistent reservation many Republican voters—and others—have expressed
about GOP front-runner Mitt Romney. They question his authenticity.
They don’t know if they can trust him. They wonder who he really is.2
In our contemporary age, authenticity is not simply the quality of
being authoritative, of “possessing original or inherent authority”
as the OED would have it.3 There is another feature to authenticity
that connects the term to a deep structure within the development of
modernity in the Western world. This is the notion of authenticity as
a correspondence between what a person says and what he or she truly
feels, a concept traced by the literary critic Lionel Trilling back to the
origins of Christianity. For Trilling, it was only relatively recently in
Western culture—during the early modern period (especially the seventeenth century in England)—that authenticity displaced sincerity as
the most elevated character trait.4 For a speaker to be sincere, he or
she merely needed to mean what was said in a given social situation. In
early modernity, the authentic person needed to be more than sincere;
society required a correspondence between a person’s moral core and
his or her speech acts. It is in this context that Polonius offers his most
memorable piece of advice to Hamlet: “This above all, to thine own self
be true . . . and it doth follow that thou canst be false to no man.”5 One
need not be true to social conventions, church doctrine, clan loyalty,
and so on, but only to oneself, the Cartesian subject. It is the beginnings
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
INTRODUCTION
3
of an existentialist rebellion based on the singularity of the self, a position taken up again by Block in his reading of the television series Mad
Men and two contemporary films.
The concept of authentikos, (that of a person who possesses both
“mastery” and “authority” over something) then, is not sufficient to
understand how authenticity works in contemporary society. Even since
the advent of the age of the copy, we continue to demand cultural artifacts that—following Benjamin—occupy a unique “presence in time and
space” in the physical world.6 This condition permits a cultural moment
in which the record collector combs garage sales for vinyl albums even
though she has a digital library of music, or in which the literature aficionado goes for a live reading by a poet, even though he could watch the
performance on YouTube. Both of them might shop at a farmer’s market
for authentic local produce while buying bulk products made in China
at Costco.
Globalization, we were told at the end of the Cold War, was supposed to flatten our cultural and political differences, creating a homogenous world where the cold logic of the marketplace dictated what films
we watched, what music we listened to, and what literature we read.7
In fact, though, our desire for a real, authentic experience remains
undimmed. Gavin James Campbell, for example, shows us that Western
travelers to Japan continue to be fascinated by Japanese toilet rituals,
going so far as to see the toilet as a window onto the Japanese soul,
even when that toilet—the hypermodern “washlet”—challenges many
Western stereotypes. Michael Martin and Stephen Fielding show how an
increased desire for authenticity has led to a flourishing scene of Cajun
restaurants in southern Louisiana and niche Indian restaurants in Great
Britain, respectively. Our increasingly globalized word has not led to
cultural flatness, but has rather piqued the interest of diners, readers,
and listeners about what lies beyond their physical and virtual borders.
Rather than destroying authenticity, globalization has created an everincreasing appetite for it.
What has resulted is a paradox in which the democratization of culture
as enabled by digitization and globalization has led to a greater desire
for authentic cultural products. It is as if Baudrillard’s famous simulacrum has been flipped on its head. Instead of living in a world in which
the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure
simulacrum,” we are instead in a constant search for something pure
and completely authentic, even when the authentic thing is little more
than a response to market demands.8 Following Baudrillard’s idea of the
simulacrum to its logical conclusion leads one to discard any notion of
authenticity in culture since there is no reality behind the virtual one created by Disneyland, CNN, YouTube, and so on. Paradoxically, however,
the advent of a new millennium rooted in the virtual experience and
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
4
RUSSELL COBB
the digital copy has led to a resurgence in authenticity as an evaluative
aesthetic property.
This reconsideration of authenticity during the digital age started
in earnest while researching the work of a distant relative (Henry Ives
Cobb) who was also one of Chicago’s most important architects and
urban planners during the turn of the twentieth century. An Internet
search led me to the work of one of his sons, who turned out to be an
accomplished artist. As I sought out more information about his career,
I discovered he had formally studied art in Paris and mounted several
important exhibitions in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s.
The search eventually led me to eBay, where an art dealer claimed to
have an oil painting dating from the 1920s by this great-great uncle, also
named Henry Ives Cobb.
I zoomed in to get a detailed view of the brush strokes, unsure of
whether it was a copy or an original. The idea that there was an actual
physical presence behind the pixels on the screen made me want to see
more. One image showed the back of the frame and I recognized the
handwriting: it was similar to that of my great-grandfather’s. The signature also looked distinctly familiar. The dealer vouched for the painting’s
authenticity and he showed me a certification that it had been bought at
an auction. The discovery of a real painting by a long-dead relative on
eBay gave me a distinct sort of pleasure that seems exceedingly rare in
the age of digital reproduction. The auction price was about what I spent
on food for a month—way above the modest disposable income in my
budget. Still, I was determined to buy it. The painting came to my house
and I unwrapped the packaging with care. I gently cleaned the 90-yearold glass and the painting came alive. There was a pleasure of knowing
that this painting was absolutely singular, and that there were no digital
copies apart from the ones that had been on eBay (the dealer later took
them down). Holding the painting in my hands reminded me of what
Walter Benjamin called the “prerequisite to the concept of authenticity”:
a work of art’s “presence in time and space.” 9 Perhaps it was the sensation
of being in the presence of something that occupied a unique space and
time and was crafted by a human hand that made me happy to possess
it. It was not the mastery of style: the painting, titled “Afternoon in the
Park,” portrays an autumn scene in New York’s Central Park in a sort of
na ïve impressionistic style, including a few obvious flaws in the way the
artist tries to bring out the effect of a late-afternoon sunshine. Indeed,
the flaws in technique made it even more appealing, more human, in its
singularity. For me, the painting was authentikos in the sense of being
an original, even if it was not quite authentikos in the sense of portraying
total mastery.
But how are we to evaluate authenticity in a cultural text such as
a work of literature or music—something that is, by its very nature, a
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
INTRODUCTION
5
performance? When it comes to evaluating authenticity in cultural texts,
critics as well as consumers often react in a manner similar to Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart when he was asked to define the parameters
of obscenity in a particular film. Stewart famously quipped that while
he could not come up with objective criteria for defining what was and
what was not obscene, “I know it when I see it.”10 Stewart opted for a
pragmatic approach, one that inevitably leads us into a tautology that
cannot escape the socially constructed nature of authenticity. (“What
makes this obscene?” one might ask. “Community standards,” another
would reply. “And who sets the standards?” “A given community.”) One
of the contributors to this volume, Michael Lopez, takes up the question
of authentic selfhood in the US legal system, exploring how such a term
can be used to represent a collective of voices when our cultural bias is
toward the individual. Lopez is concerned with how one can create a
collective self under Rule 23, the class action lawsuit, which allows for a
group of people to be represented by one voice.
It is because we often defer to a pragmatic approach to the question
of authenticity that we often debate not the concept per se, but the perception of it in cultural texts. Indeed, an entire subfield of marketing
examines the concept of authenticity with regard to its degree of success
as an advertising campaign, without any regard as to the truth of the
claims. In the field of marketing, scholars hope to understand the characteristics that consumers identify as an “authentic Argentine Malbec,”
unaware, perhaps, of the irony that anything that reeks of marketing is,
ipso facto, deemed “inauthentic” by consumers in search of something
that is not mediated through globalized capitalism.11 The fact that something is dreamed up in a meeting at an advertising corporation runs
against what, recalling Benjamin again, we might call the “first principle
of the authentic”: that the artifact occupies a singular place and time in
the real world, and that it evokes a “sense of place.”
The mere existence of a thing in a particular time and space is not
enough to create an aura of authenticity, however. Authenticity also
works in paradoxical tandem with the marketplace, as we can see in
Amanda Haste’s exploration of religious monasteries’ vexed relationship
with the music business (the monks, known as The Religious, sell their
music to a global audience seeking “authentic” monastic chant, while
trying to strike a careful balance between their customers’ demands and
their religious imperatives to use chant as solely as a form of prayer).
Authentic cultural artifacts are often appreciated as such in an inverted
correlation to its value in the marketplace in Western capitalism, such
that a monetary value on something becomes a taint to its authenticity. (Laura Graham, e.g., shows how modern, Westernized yoga is often
perceived by practitioners as inauthentic or corrupt, while Indian yoga
is considered timeless and pure). In other words, to create an aura of
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
6
RUSSELL COBB
authenticity in the age of digital reproduction, an object or a text must
seem not only irreproducible, original, but also uncorrupted by Western
capitalism, even though these very objects rely on the marketplace for
dissemination.
This curious relationship between authenticity and capitalism bears
some explanation. Cultural texts that are deemed to be “sell-outs” or
“fake” acquire such status not out of aesthetic considerations (a very
well-executed but fake Vermeer may achieve the same amount of detail
and artistry as the original) but out of their relationship to money.
Commodification—or the transformation of a good into a product
whose value is determined by the market—is a phenomenon that destroys
the artifice of authenticity, even though all cultural products have a market value. Lionel Trilling sums up this attitude succinctly in Sincerity
and Authenticity : “Money, in short, is the principle of the inauthentic in
human existence.”12
Literature—specifically the genre of literary nonfiction—poses a
related, although somewhat different, set of issues concerning authenticity that are explored by Katharine Bausch in her essay on Norman
Mailer’s “The White Negro” and Katherine Edwards’s article on contemporary American memoir. Broadly speaking, nonfiction is deemed
“authentic” if it is perceived by its readers to depict in its pages what it
claims to represent in real life. Part of the appeal of the memoir is that it
allows the reader to witness life experiences (drug abuse, homelessness,
racism, etc.) that are radically different from the reader’s. But how can
the reader know if the author is indeed depicting this experience truthfully? Whose truth is the memoirist depicting? If it is a purely subjective
truth with no larger political or philosophical claims, what purpose does
it serve? If it claims to speak on behalf of a larger group of people, what
obligation does it have to represent other voices within a community?
Once the memoirist abandons the singular voice of the “I,” however,
it is no longer a memoir, but a claim for collectivity. The construction
of the self in a memoir or autobiography is, then, also vexed by the first
principle of authenticity—as it strives for a larger, collective truth, it loses
its singularity in place and time.
While authenticity may have staged a comeback in the zeitgeist
(music journalists are especially prone to debating this or that band’s
authenticity), it is worth remembering that the concept is—as most
of the authors in this volume would concur—a purely social construction. Authenticity can never be set in stone by a religion, a nation,
or a linguistic community, because our standards and expectations of
the Real are constantly evolving, and the construction of the artifice
of authenticity depends on the context.13 In Ceccarini’s and Martin’s
respective essays, it is legislative bodies and regional organizations that
attempt to adjudicate what passes as authentic Italian or Cajun food.
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
INTRODUCTION
7
In Nicola Mann’s article on the television show “Good Times,” it is a
balance between the demands of primetime TV and the desire of the
producers to create an image of blackness that corresponded to the reality of urban life among poor African Americans in the 1970s. In many
of the articles, however, the power to establish something as authentic
is purely discursive, and thus without any legal or political body to act
as an authenticity enforcer. The artifice of authenticity is, in some of
these essays, a literary device, such as in Meneses’s article on Roberto
Bola ño’s “translatorese” or Jeaninne Pitas’s essay on Alejo Carpentier.
It is a commonplace trope of travel writing in Campbell’s analysis of
representations of the Japanese toilet.
In all these cases, authenticity becomes not just an evocation of a
certain time and space; it has the added burden of being synonymous
with the Truth. A detour back to the OED can help us understand
the relationship between authenticity and truth claims. The OED’s citations for “authenticity” all evince a concern for truth as a common element in authenticity, such as a quotation from Boswell: “What I have
preserved . . . has the value of the most perfect authenticity.”14 In fact,
though, the OED gets us no further than authenticity as a synonym
for “real” or “true.” Existentialist philosophy, on the other hand, is a
touchstone for many of the contributors dealing with the connection
between truth and authenticity. To generalize for a moment, we can
say that existentialism regards authenticity as a question that is to be
addressed by the individual in his or her “self-making.” For existentialists such as Kierkegaard, being authentic implied a sort of “transparency” between one’s actions and one’s true self, regardless of social
roles.15 Existentialist authenticity has echoes of Polonius’s final words of
advice in Hamlet in its emphasis on self-knowledge, as explained above.
Kathyn Telling’s study of reactions to the critic Judith Butler center
around these existentialist notions of authenticity as Butler’s critics
accuse her of being deceptive through her use of jargon. Telling shows
that Butler becomes a site for moral judgments not only about how to
communicate an authentic life, but also how to be a good feminist or a
legitimate academic.
The concern for authenticity in personal relations, however, is understandable. In the age of the copy, our very subjectivity has become fragmented by the performative selves we display on Twitter, Facebook, and
so on. Our virtual selves have multiplied the performances inherent in all
social interactions, making Erving Goffman’s theory of the “presentation of the self in everyday life” seem quaint in its one dimensionality.16
Although Goffman examined the way we projected oneself to multiple
audiences, we now have multiple selves—even virtual avatars—to contend with. We wonder whether the e-mail we received from the Dean
congratulating us on a great year is authentic, or is part of a game to
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
8
RUSSELL COBB
curry favor for some initiative. Did the people we met briefly at a conference “friend” us on Facebook because they saw the potential for an
important relationship, or were they simply trying to boost the number
of friends in their network? Or—worse yet—were they trying to gain
intelligence about which grants and jobs we might be applying for?
Authenticity in literary studies is further complicated by the fact that
a sole author can rarely create the authenticity effect by him or herself.
More common is a subtle process of construction that involves not only
the text but also the audience, which usually brings a horizon of expectations to its experience with the text. Dean MacCannell’s study of the
discourse of tourism in the 1970s helps us understand how the discourse of authenticity is not simply imposed by one person on a group,
but part of a back-and-forth process between tourist and host, as well as
writer and reader. MacCannell demonstrates how the encounter of the
tourist with the host produces an unstable effect of authenticity. The
modern tourist, MacCannell argues, is in search of an experience that
will reveal the “life as it is really lived, even to get in with the natives.”
At the same time, however, “[t]he term ‘tourist’ is increasingly used
as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously
inauthentic experiences.”17 In a tourist setting, it is often impossible to
know if what is being presented is a transparent representation of life
as it is really lived by the host or a delicate spectacle that the host has
designed to please the tourist. This is a question taken up by Pitas in her
perspicacious essay on Alejo Carpentier’s novel, The Lost Steps. In sum,
MacCannell states, “[w]hat is taken to be real might, in fact, be a show
that is based on the structure of reality.”18 What is perceived as authentic
is more often than not a staged production that is borne of an encounter
between host and tourist. Authenticity, in other words, is an effect, not
a reality. This does not, I think, make it any less real. If a tourist destination, a cuisine, a work of art, or a television show is experienced as
authentic by an individual, then such an experience can only be refuted
by a morally superior claim of false consciousness, a move that does a
sort of symbolic violence to the individual experience.
In simple terms, in the age of the digital copy, reality has struck back
with a vengeance. From the locavore food movement to the boom in
memoir book publishing to the resurgence in vinyl record collecting,
the allusive aura of authenticity has trumped postmodern relativism
throughout the culture. That much of it is an artifice constructed by
marketing geniuses or starving artists desperate to make a buck seems to
matter less and less. We may not understand all the modes of production
and distribution behind our food, our art, or our culture, but we want it
to be real. How will we know what that is? We will simply have to believe
that we will know it when we see it.
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
INTRODUCTION
9
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).
2. Dan Balz, “For Mitt Romney, Authenticity Remains an Issue,”
Washington Post August 1, 2012. http://articles.washingtonpost.com
/2012–01–08/politics/35441822_1_mitt-romney-pious-baloney-rick
-santorum/2 (March 14, 2013; accessed September 28, 2013).
3. “Authentic, adj. and n,” Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online,
September 2013 (Oxford University Press). http://www.oed.com/view
/Entry/13314 (accessed October 1, 2013).
4. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1972).
5. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914).
http://www.bartleby.com/70/ (accessed September 28, 2013).
6. Benjamin, Illuminations, 220.
7. See, for example, Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of
the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
8. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard,
Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988), 170.
9. Benjamin, Illuminations, 220.
10. Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964.
11. A couple of recent book titles attest to the power of authenticity as a
branding mechanism, among them: Rohit Bhargava, Personality Not
Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Brands
Get It Back (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008) and Michael Beverland,
Building Brand Authenticity: Seven Habits of Iconic Brands (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Beverland states in the blurb to the book
that “authenticity is one of the key pillars of marketing.”
12. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 124.
13. This is not to say that nations, religions, and linguistic communities do
not attempt to fix permanent boundaries on what is authentic.
14. “Authenticity,” OED online.
15. Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2010 edition). http://plato
.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism (accessed October
1, 2013).
16. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York:
Anchor, 1959).
17. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 592.
18. MacCannell, The Tourist, 593.
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Inde x
Acadian culture, 16–17, 19–20, 22
acculturation, 19, 21, 40, 50–1, 87
Acker, Kathy, 161, 163–4
Adorno, Theodor, 234, 262–3, 266,
268, 270, 274
advertising, 5, 71, 94, 223–5, 230, 266
“age of the copy,” 221
Alexander, Father John D., 74, 82, 84
anthropology, 48, 100, 119, 131, 143,
212, 279
Appadurai, Arjun, 36, 48
appropriation, 90, 158, 162–71,
187–8, 193, 200–1, 230
archives
and authenticity, 9, 101, 139–40,
142, 147, 149, 151–2, 279
artifacts, 1, 3, 5, 143–8, 151–2, 230,
247
Associazione Pizzaioli e Similari, 26,
32–3
“aura of authenticity,” 1, 5, 8, 271
authenticity
and capitalism, 230
definitions of, 14, 233, 234, 261–2
in digital reproduction, 1–2, 147–8,
151, 158
and food, 2, 15
and legislation, 13, 159–60, 250
in literature, 4–6, 155, 175–83,
187–201, 205–17
in literary studies, 8, 207–8
in painting, 4, 168–9, 226
in pizza, 23–32
in skinhead subcultures, 261–72
as social construction, 23, 35–6
and tourism, 8
authentikos, 1, 2, 3
autobiography
as literary genre, 6, 205–13, 217–18
“back regions,” 15, 127–8, 135
Bad Writing Prize, 234–7, 241
Bangladeshi
food and authenticity, 38, 42,
45–8, 52
Barthes, Roland, 39, 50, 208, 217
Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 9, 171, 173
BBC, 45, 51, 114
Benedictine monks, 72, 76, 80, 82–3
Benjamin, Walter, 1, 3–5, 9, 68, 100,
176, 183–4, 210, 257
Berry, Bill, 207–8, 210–12, 214,
217–18
blackness
and authenticity, 7, 53, 64, 66,
187–8, 191, 193, 198, 200
Bolaño, Roberto, 7, 155, 175–85
Bonaparte, Paulina, 123–4, 134
Borges, Jorge Luis, 165–6, 208
Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 36, 40–1, 44–5,
48, 50–1, 236, 243–4
bricolage, 60, 262, 268
Britishness, 266, 268
Butler, Judith, 7, 59, 67–8, 219,
233–45
Cabrini Green (housing project), 55,
57–8, 60, 63, 66–7
Cajun culture, 3, 6, 11, 13–15, 16–22,
19, 21
capitalism
and authenticity, 5–6, 96, 222,
224, 230
Carpentier, Alejo, 7–8, 101, 123–4,
126, 128–32, 134–6
Cartesian. See René Descartes
CBS, 55–6, 66–8
Certified Copy, 219, 223, 225–6
Charlatans, 234, 242, 245
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
282
INDEX
Christianity, 2, 35, 180, 275
Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The,
110, 120
clothing
and authenticity, 2, 118, 263,
266–71, 275
CNN, 3, 104
Cobb, Henry Ives, 4
Cold War, 3, 274
collage, 23, 163, 169
colonial. See colonialism
colonialism, 89–90, 95, 119, 123,
124, 133, 190
commercialization, 51, 167, 262–3,
268, 270–1
commodification, 6, 70, 86–7, 90,
98, 183, 185
Conceptualism, 173
conformity, 42, 194–5, 197, 229, 253
Constitution, United States, 256, 258
consumerism, 31, 35, 39–41, 81–2,
96, 108, 111, 224–5, 230, 248
copyright, 2, 158–62, 164–6, 170,
172, 278
Costco, 3
Creative Commons, 150, 166
Creole, Louisiana, 13–14
cuisine, 8, 11, 14–15, 17–21, 25, 28,
31, 36–44, 48
cuisines, 18, 28, 44
Culler, Jonathan, 237, 242–4
database
and authenticity, 139–43, 148–52
deconstruction, 66, 142, 171, 201,
222
democratization
and authenticity, 1, 3, 41, 221,
232, 256
Descartes, René, 2, 133, 219
dialectical, 249, 253
Dickens, Charles, 247–8, 256
digitalization, 3, 101, 159, 170
digitization. See digitalization
Disneyland, 3
“distressed genres,” 139–40, 143–4,
146, 151–2
Dukes v. Wal-Mart, 250, 257–60
eBay, 4, 272
Ebony, 67
Englishness, 266
enlightenment, 66, 184–5
epistemology, 50, 87, 97
ethics, 162, 175, 252, 254–5, 274
ethnicity, 17, 20–1, 39
Europe, 24, 72, 107, 125, 160, 175,
189, 277
European Council Regulations, 24,
28, 30–1, 33–4, 38
existentialism
authenticity in, 7, 9, 222, 231,
252–4
exoticism, 42–6, 48, 108, 134
fake, 6, 13, 115, 167–9, 171, 191–2,
195, 198, 231
feminism, 7, 219, 233, 235, 238–9,
242–5
fiction, 59, 67, 134–5, 158, 180–1,
206–9, 212–13, 216–18, 225,
264, 278
Folsom, Ed, 140–3, 150–4
foodways, 11, 15, 19, 31
Franklin, Benjamin, 210, 212–13
Freud, Sigmund, 111, 119, 221, 224
Frey, James, 205–6, 208–9, 212, 217
García Márquez, Gabriel, 175, 178,
180, 183, 185
genre, 6, 65, 69, 74, 80, 139–43,
148, 151–2, 209–12
globalization, 3, 5, 34, 159–60,
187–8, 201, 277, 278
globalizing. See globalization
Groundhog Day, 219, 227–30
Gusdorf, Georges, 207, 210–13,
217–18
Haitian Revolution, 123
Hall, Stuart, 58, 60, 64–5, 67–8, 274
Hamlet, 2, 7, 9, 216
Hebdidge, Dick, 262, 274
Hegemann, Helen, 2, 157–66, 169–70,
172–3
Heidegger, Martin, 262, 268
on authenticity, 14–15
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
INDEX
Helstosky, Carol, 25, 34
Hinduism, 88–9
hipsters, 187, 189, 193, 195, 199,
200–1
Hollywood, 55, 112, 192
Houllebecq, Michel, 2, 157–8, 165–73
ideological. See ideology
ideology, 2, 57, 61–3, 159, 162, 211,
224–5, 272–3
inauthenticity, 14–15, 58, 92, 96,
144, 155, 168, 189, 191, 195,
198, 216, 234–5, 242, 270
Indian, 2–3, 5, 11, 19, 35–8, 40–50,
52, 85, 88–91, 95–6, 98, 130,
133
Indianness, 96
intellectual property. See copyright
internet
and authenticity, 4, 70–1, 140,
158, 160–1, 165, 171, 261, 272
irony, 5, 131, 173, 189, 207, 209,
214, 238, 242
Italianness, 23
Japan, 3, 27, 32–3, 101, 103–21, 192,
277
Westernization and, 109, 111, 115
World War II and, 109–10
Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 253–4, 259–60
kitsch, 46, 60, 167, 236, 244
Koons and Hirsch Dividing Up the Art
World (painting), 167–8
Lindholm, Charles, 23–4, 32, 34
locavore, 8
Lyotard, Jean-François, 148, 153,
254, 260
MacCannell, Dean, 8–9, 15, 19,
21–2, 101, 125, 127–8, 136
Mad Men, 3, 219, 223–5
Mailer, Norman, 6, 155, 187–203, 223
Manovich, Lev, 141, 148, 150–1,
153–4
marketing, 5, 8–9, 43, 47, 70–1, 77,
81, 83, 85, 223–4, 266, 269
283
Marxist, 222, 237, 262
masculinity, 188–96, 198–202, 215,
266–7
mashups, 147, 165
Mauer, Barry, 147–9, 151–4
memoir
concept of authenticity in, 6, 120,
213, 218, 205–11, 213–17
methodology, 63, 216
modernism, 15, 169–70, 173
modernist. See modernism
modernity, 2, 11, 15, 90, 92, 96–7,
105, 134, 171, 255
monasteries, 5, 69–71, 73, 76–7, 81–2
money
relationship to authenticity, 2, 6,
20, 41, 116, 126, 249, 251, 268
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 56–8,
62–3, 66–8
multiculturalism, 48, 50, 270
Mundy, Carol, 139–40, 144–6, 151–2
narrative, 1, 53, 62, 68, 70, 72, 87–8,
90, 92, 95, 125, 139, 141–2, 146,
150, 152, 175–7, 180–2, 189–91,
193, 198, 210, 214–17, 219, 228,
240, 248–55, 258, 264, 266–7
nationalism, 65, 89, 118, 239, 278
nationalist. See nationalism
Neapolitan, 11, 23–7, 29–33
neoliberalism, 183, 185
nihilism, 196–7, 225, 229
nostalgia, 43–4, 68, 143–4, 146, 153
Nussbaum, Martha, 234–5, 238–40,
242–5
Odyssey, 128, 130, 132, 134
Olney, James, 209–11, 213, 215,
217–18
Orientalism, 53, 95, 100, 117
original, 1–2, 4, 6, 18, 21, 23–4, 30,
37, 42, 47, 49, 68, 72, 76, 86,
118, 121, 139, 143–6, 152, 164,
167, 171, 177–82, 184, 188,
205, 210, 212, 217, 221–2, 226,
243, 262, 264–6, 268
Otherness, 101, 136–7
Oxford English Dictionary, 2, 7, 9
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825
284
INDEX
parody, 126, 155, 176–8, 181–2, 238
Pepys, Samuel, 103, 116
performance
relationship to authenticity, 3, 5,
59, 63, 72–9, 83, 92, 125, 128,
134–5, 227, 229
photography, 60, 145, 147, 265
Pirate Party, 159
pizza, 11, 23–4, 26, 28–34, 277
plagiarism
and authenticity, 2, 155, 158, 160,
162–3, 165–6, 169, 171
Plato, 53, 129, 223, 229, 231
postcolonialism, 95, 237, 278
postindustrial, 143, 231
postmodernism, 2, 8, 58, 105, 160,
162, 172, 229, 243–5, 254,
259–60, 274
poststructuralist, 233, 237–9
premodern, 21, 85–92, 94–5, 97, 99
primitivism, 125, 131–2, 134, 189,
191, 194–6, 198–9
Stewart, Susan, 139–40, 143–6, 151–4
subcultures, 188, 261–4, 267–8, 270,
272–3, 275
subjectivity, 7, 56–7, 222–3, 227,
230–1, 239, 253
symbolic ethnicity, 17, 20–1
racism, 6, 56, 146, 153, 265, 269
Religious, The (monastic order), 5,
38, 69–71, 73–5, 77, 79, 81–4
remixing, 147, 150, 151, 158, 169
restaurants, 3, 11, 16–20, 22, 25–6,
36–8, 41, 45–7
rhizome, 140, 142, 147
Rule 23 (US Supreme Court), 5, 219,
249, 251–4, 256–8
Victorians, 73, 105–6, 108–9, 111, 114
sampling, 147–9, 151, 153
Shakespeare, William, 9, 221
simulacra, 3, 53, 77, 167, 169–70,
223, 226, 230–1
simulacrum. See simulacra
sincerity, 2, 79, 86, 216, 233
spirituality, 15, 70, 76, 90, 92, 94–5,
97–8, 278
staged authenticity, 15, 19
Stewart, Potter, 5
Taylor, Charles, 259, 263–4, 269,
272, 275
technology, 71, 143, 150, 158,
169–71, 278
television, 3, 7–8, 44, 53, 56, 58–9,
61–2, 65–7, 127, 177, 181–2,
198–9, 205, 207, 223
tourism, 8, 15–17, 21–2, 105, 124,
126, 130, 278
translation, 25, 31, 155, 164–5,
176–84, 218
“translatorese,” 7, 155, 176–83
travel, 7, 15–16, 23–4, 101, 112, 115,
124–7, 133, 140, 145, 268
Trilling, Lionel, 2, 6, 9, 216
washlet, 3, 112–14, 119–21
Westernization, 105, 108–9, 111–12
Whitman, Walt, 101, 140, 148, 150
Wikipedia, 104, 116–17, 157, 165–6,
168–9, 172–3
Winfrey, Oprah, 205, 217
yoga
etymology and definitions of, 91
historiography, 88
modern, 85–92, 94–9
premodern, 21, 85–92, 94–5,
97, 99
westernization, 89
Yoga Journal, 86, 87, 90–5, 97, 99
YouTube, 3, 104
Zen, 105, 114
Copyrighted material – 9781137353825