Introduction

‘Why’, Steven Poole writing in the New Statesman asked in March 2013, ‘are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity?’ Phenomena as diverse as snobbish hipster lionising of artisan coffee and organic food, the craze for vintage clothing and scandals over James Frey’s fake misery memoir or Beyoncé’s lip-synching at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2013 all seem to testify to pervasive contemporary anxieties over reality, sincerity and truth. Of course, fretting over authenticity has a venerable lineage in western culture, from Plato through to the existentialists, and creative artists have long interrogated and toyed with our hunger for the real (so, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 was not truly ‘written by himself’). Yet a search for ‘authenticity’ through Google Book’s Ngram Viewer reveals a sharp increase in frequency of use of the term since the early 1990s. In an age of unprecedented cultural globalisation and insecurity about identity, in which digital technologies have rendered ‘everything liquid and endlessly revisable’, our fetishizing desire to distinguish the trustworthy from the fake has palpably intensified (Poole 2013).

Events since March 2013 have served only to confirm the perspicacity of Poole’s diagnosis. The success – albeit to wildly varying degrees and extents – of politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has demonstrated the potent allure of supposedly authentic, unspun, anti-establishment figures to significant segments of the contemporary Anglo-American electorate (Umbach and Humphrey 2016). There has been a rolling debate amongst feminists as to whether trans women who have lived significant parts of their lives as men are entitled to claim to be ‘real women’, to use the phrase of the broadcaster Jenni Murray. Firmly rebutting Murray’s assertion, the equality group Stonewall responded that being trans was ‘about an innate sense of self’: ‘To imply anything other than this is reductive and hurtful to many trans people who are only trying to live life as their authentic selves’.¹ Relatedly, the American feminist author Susan Faludi offered a thought-provoking and poignant meditation on ‘true’ identity in her account of her relationship with her long-estranged Holocaust survivor father who transitioned late in life (Faludi 2016). More mundanely, much journalistic angst has been expended over whether British street food outlets can remain authentic as they morph into larger and more successful businesses (Cocozza 2014), while the paradoxes of ‘authentic tourist experiences’ continue to be chewed over by analysts (Dennett and Song 2016). It is scarcely surprising if this obsession should induce bewilderment: on the one hand, we are constantly enjoined to be true to our authentic selves, honest, sincere and candid, yet on the other the persistent mantra of every self-improvement guide and guru is ‘fake it ‘til you make it!’.

Authenticity is, of course, not simply a matter of concern within journalism and popular culture, for it has also been much debated in scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In historical theory, the linguistic turn in effect accused historical practitioners of an act of imposture, for obfuscating the categorical difference between their writing and the reality it purported to represent. Reactions against these charges frequently embody a yearning to recuperate that reality, whether through the advocacy of affective, somatic and materialist turns or in the search for the enduring ‘presence’ of the past. Relatedly, Marnie Hughes-Warrington recently brought into focus various forms of forgery, deception, prescription, appropriation and outright denial in her exploration of the genre of Revisionist Histories (Hughes-Warrington 2013). In memory studies, the issue is central, and engaged in diverse ways. On the one hand, technological change has engendered new forms of representation and modes of immersive display which produce so-called ‘prosthetic memories’ (Landsberg 2004), deeply-felt emotional and affective connections to pasts which were not directly experienced. On the other hand, there is a proliferation of concepts such as ‘postmemory’, ‘secondary witnessing’ and ‘vicarious trauma’, seeking to grasp how a traumatic heritage might be transmitted beyond the span of living memory. Meanwhile, practices of ‘second-order’ or ‘mimetic’ remembrance flourish, whether in the ‘virtual Jewish’ renaissance in post-Holocaust, post-Cold War, Eastern Europe, historical re-enactment or video games. Simultaneously, across varied domains of cultural, scientific and literary theory, speculation rages about the ethical, political and aesthetic implications of the ‘posthuman’ future, as traditional notions of human selfhood – of consciousness, intelligence and mortality – are challenged by cyborgisation and looming environmental catastrophe.

Such examples could be endlessly multiplied, and the contents of this collection demonstrate that cognate issues are in play in many more disciplinary and sub-disciplinary contexts. The collection stages a wide-ranging interdisciplinary interrogation of the concept of authenticity in order to cast new light on this contemporary condition. The contributors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including memory studies, cultural history, English literature, theatre studies and art criticism, and they explore a very wide range of subjects. They underline the fundamental point that authenticity has no single stable definition, but is used in very diverse ways – both descriptively and prescriptively – in many diverse contexts. They also make clear that it is not an inherent quality but rather the product of orchestration, performance and inter-subjective negotiation. It is hoped that their insights will help readers to navigate through our increasingly confusing world in which authenticity is a ubiquitous concept, both highly prized and desired and yet profoundly elusive and contested.²

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Patrick Finney teaches in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK. His research focuses on two main areas: the history of international relations, with particular reference to the inter-war years and to issues of method and theory; and collective memory, with particular reference to the Second World War. His edited collection Remembering the Second World War is forthcoming with Routledge in 2017, and he is guest editing a theme issue of the International History Review on ‘Debating the Cultural Turn’ which will appear early in 2018.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the contributors for their efforts in writing and revising their papers over the last few years. I would also like to thank those many colleagues who offered advice on the collection and who acted as peer reviewers for the individual submissions.

Notes

1. ‘Radio 4’s Jenni Murray criticised over trans women article’, BBC News, 5 March 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39173398.

2. Sections of this introduction, including the whole first paragraph, are reproduced from the original call for papers published in March 2014. Nonetheless, the introduction remains entirely authentic …