The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World

Authenticity in our globalized world is a paradox: culture flows across borders with unprecedented ease while consumers demand "the real thing" like never before. This collection examines how authenticity relates to cultural products under globalization, looking closely at how a cuisine, musical genre, or artifact attains its aura of genuineness, of originality, when almost all traditional cultural products are invented in a certain time and place. The contributors in this volume identify how the aura - "the authority of the original object" - is generated in the first place. The methodologies and disciplines come from a variety of sources: cultural studies, qualitative sociology, musicology, literary studies, and beyond.

Russell Cobb is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

1. Introduction: The Artifice of Authenticity in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Russell Cobb
PART I: A MATTER OF TASTE: AUTHENTICITY AND INNOVATION IN FOOD CULTURE
2. Searching for Authenticity: Cajun Food and a 'Golden Age" of Cajun History; Michael S. Martin
3. Food Bureaucracy: Pizza Authentication by the European Union; Rossella Ceccarini
4. Currying Flavour: Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rise of Indian Food in the United Kingdom; Stephen A. Fielding
PART II: PERFORMING THE REAL: MEDIATING AUTHENTICITY IN MUSIC, TELEVISION, AND PUBLISHING
5. Performing Cultural Authenticity in CBS's Good Times; Nicola Mann
6. Buying into the Monastic Experience: Are Chant Recordings the Real Thing?; Amanda Haste
7. The Discourse of Authenticity in Yoga Journal; Laura Christine Graham
PART III: STEROTYPES, CLICHÉS, AND THE REAL THING: AUTHENTICITY IN CULTURAL CONTACT ZONES
8. From the Chrysanthemum Throne to the Porcelain Throne: Anglo-American Tourists and the Japanese Toilet; Gavin James Campbell
9. Tourists as Primitives? Inverting the Tourist Gaze in The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier; Jeannine M. Pitas
10. The Database as a Distressed Genre; John Venecek
PART IV: CUT, PASTE, AUTHENTICATE: LITERARY STUDIES AND THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY
11. 'There Is No Such Thing as Originality Anyway. . . ': Authorship in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Kaja Marczewska
12. Like in the Gringo Movies: Parodic Translation in Roberto Bolaño's 2666; Juan Meneses
13. Norman Mailer, Hipsters, and the Authenticity of the White Negro; Katharine Bausch
14. Authenticity as Currency in the Contemporary American Memoir; Katherine Edwards
PART V: REAL POLITICS: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY
15. Beyond the Infinite Loop? Subjectivity in the Age of the Copy; James Block
16. Real Feminists and Fake Feminists: The Charge of Inauthenticity in Responses to Judith Butler; Kathryn Telling
17. Authenticity, Existentialism, and the American Exception of Rule 23; Michael Lopez
18. That Old School Lonsdale: Authenticity and Clothes in Streetpunk and Skinhead Culture; Aimar Ventsel