Authentic Discourse Research Articles

Bidding or negotiating? Traditional material culture between silent narratives and discourse of authenticity

Bidding or negotiating? Traditional material culture between silent narratives and discourse of authenticity

What we know and do not know about authenticity in dining experiences: A systematic literature review

In light of the important role of authenticity in dining experiences and the diverse conceptualisations of authenticity especially in the tourism context, this study reviews authenticity literature in dining experiences. Adopting a systematic quantitative approach, this paper maps out the current landscape of authenticity in dining experiences and offers insights for future research. The review findings highlight the overwhelming focus on examining authenticity of the Thing and authenticity of the Self in dining experiences and points to an enhancement of understandings of authenticity by also conceptualising authenticity of the Organisation. The findings indicate that while initial steps towards scales of authenticity have been made, there is no multi-dimensional scale development of authenticity that yields key determinants shaping authentic dining experiences, as well as a lack of systematic quantitative research into authenticity discourse using online restaurant reviews. Directions for further studies are suggested to address the identified gaps.

The Exhaustion of Authenticity: Biopolitical Aural Regimes and American Popular Music

AbstractJeffrey T. Nealon proposes that “twenty-first-century American biopolitical subjectivity” has as its “overarching logic” an arrangement in which being for something signifies a content-less affirmation: “I’m not like everyone else.” For Nealon, this “excorporative” logic grows out of, coincides with, and exhausts rock music’s discourses of authenticity from the second half of the twentieth century. Today, an endlessly interconnected network emerges in which old forms of cultural “individualism” become ever-interchangeable modes of “hip commodity consumption,” indexing a neoliberal regime that renders “everybody” into “prosumers” (producers-consumers). This review-essay considers the extent and limits of this proposal, querying Nealon’s understanding of listening and aurality and indicating the challenges presented by bypassing the mesopolitical in an effort to outline the macropolitics of consumption and the micropolitics of individuality.

¡Y vaya si quería yo a mi juventud! Reflexiones sobre la idea de juventud a partir de la autobiografía, Impresiones y recuerdos (1893), de Federico Gamboa

This article explores some of the ideas surrounding the concept of youth, especially those that the nineteenth-century writer and diplomat Federico Gamboa (1864- 1939) uses to sustain many of the experiences that shape his autobiography: Impressions and Memories (1893). Specifically, the above- entioned text is described in order to analyze the narrative postures that Gamboa used to construct his ‘authentic discourse’ (Pozuelo Yvanco, 2006); at the same time, this text is contrasted with some ideas of his contemporaries. The precocious confessor plays with the youth variable, especially to edit his memoirs at an early age (28 years old), but also to make himself a place among his contemporaries and justify his past, which is far removed from what the rules and rituals of the Mexican middle-class defined as desirable or suitable. Beyond the provocative character of the author, this type of documentary sources, included in the category of personal papers, allow us to approach the desires and imaginary of the Mexican middle class of a particular era: porfiriato (1876-1911).

JĘZYKI I PAMIĘĆ KULTUROWA. O GLOTTODYDAKTYCZNYM POTENCJALE MIEJSC PAMIĘCI

Looking for motivating concepts to stimulate integrated language andculture-related teaching and learning processes in the foreign languageclassroom, the vibrant concept of Cultural Memory is certainly an issueto pay attention to. It offers a variety of occasions for language and cultureawareness training tightly connected with language learning, reachingfar beyond traditional regional studies. Realms of memory, acting asproducts and markers of a complex cultural memory, can reveal to whatextent (by whom, by which means, to what aims) cultural patterns andmeanings are constructed, how they change or under which circumstancesthey survive long periods of time. Up-to-date foreign languagedidactics can make use of this in aiming at symbolic competence (ClaireKramsch). Understanding culture as an ongoing process of (de-and re-)construction, learners might be enabled to notice and (partly) participatein authentic discourses, going on in different languages. Realms ofmemory, manifesting themselves per definition e.g. as texts, pictures,sounds, buildings, historic or mythic persons, objects, terms or whole culturalconcepts, own a considerable linguistic and cultural potential. Thisclearly points at content and process oriented learning processes involvingthe foreign language as a natural means of exploration.The article discusses criteria which might help to choose realms ofmemory suitable for the foreign language classroom and takes a look attwo genuinely “German-speaking” examples in the field of sport (Córdoba1978) and everyday objects (Schweizermesser). They can illustratethe wide range of didactic possibilities and stimulating methods whicharise from authentic and vivid parts of a widely understood culture.

It’s hard to do fashion in Istanbul – or is it?

All major cities have a unique ‘atmosphere’ that influences inhabitants and visitors, and that shapes ideas and objects related to it. The identity of a city is a social construct, and this symbolic, imaginary construct is associated with a specific local production system. With its heritage combining Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman elements and its contemporary urban life, Istanbul is recognized as one of the world’s cultural capitals. Turkey, on the other hand, is one of the world’s leading textile-manufacturing countries, with the majority of products made in and around Istanbul. This is noteworthy at a time when the consumer fashion industry simultaneously is drawing on discourses of exoticism, the primitive, orientalism and authenticity, one factor underlying the breakdown of the monopoly of Milan, Paris, New York and London on fashion. Drawing on primary research undertaken through semi-structured interviews with designers, social media specialists and textile engineers in Turkey, this article provides an overview of the contemporary Turkish fashion industry with a focus on neo-Ottoman style. The article begins by evaluating Istanbul’s contemporary fashion industry and continues with how fashion produced in Istanbul affects Istanbul’s image worldwide, and finally explains how Istanbul reciprocally affects the designs created in this city.

Tactical authenticity in the production of autoethnographic mad narratives

First-person accounts of madness and of encountering psychiatric services provide important sociocultural and psychological knowledge about the subjectivity of distress. The importance of such accounts is often based upon a claim of the authenticity of personal experience. However, authenticity is a highly heterogeneous concept: a popular current manifestation of the discourse of authenticity is in positive psychology, where it is often underpinned by humanist assumptions such as the rational autonomous self. The post-structuralist critique of humanism challenged such essentialist notions some time ago and has been adopted explicitly by research methodologies such as autoethnography. The purpose of this article is to argue that this tension—between the value of methods such as autoethnography that offer a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the subjective experience of madness on the one hand, and the problems with an essentialist conception of the ‘authentic’ self on the other—can be addressed by the deployment of a reconceptualised form of authenticity based on Spivak’s (in: Guha and Spivak (eds.) Selected subaltern studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988) notion of ‘strategic essentialism’, especially when modified by De Certeau’s (The practice of everyday life, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1984) distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategies’. The implications of this distinction in terms of developing autoethnographies of distress are then discussed.

Everyday life in a magnificent landscape: Making sense of the nature/culture dichotomy in the mountains of Jämtland, Sweden

Although the nature/culture dichotomy has been extensively criticized by scholars, it remains pervasive to our conception of the world. Discourses of nature as a pristine milieu and of culture as a realm of human dominance not only impact cognition, but also the local practices of those involved daily in such contested areas. In this study of the mountainous area of the Jämtland County, Sweden, we report on the ways local stakeholders make sense of their surrounding landscape in the wake of its magnificent character as they go about their daily lives as residents, entrepreneurs and recreationists. We turn to the notion of dwelling to frame these narratives. This ultimately becomes an exploration of the contradictions and confusions within and between the discourses of conservation, management, recreation, authenticity and tourism development that affect how local stakeholders consciously and subconsciously cope with the tensions brought about by the nature/culture dichotomy. The findings are used to propose a critical, as well as constructive, notion of dwelling that stresses the importance of opening up to new possibilities and responsibilities during negotiations over protected areas.

‘Folds of the heart’: performing life experience, emotion and empathy in Japanese tango music culture

ABSTRACTIn the Argentine tango music culture of Japan, to have undergone many life experiences is considered critical in order to perform the powerful emotions of tango. Narratives by Japanese tango musicians stress ‘each musician’s feelings’ as crucial in shaping a good tango performance, while empathy is considered important in cultivating such feelings. Based on the author’s field research in Japan and Argentina, and by adding a different nuance to Carolyn Pedwell’s notions of transnational ‘affective relations’, this essay examines how Japanese historical narratives, rooted in aesthetic and moral ethos, fabricate discourses of tango authenticity by Japanese musicians. Taking a closer look at the ways in which Japanese musicians discuss tango’s emotion illuminates how Argentine tango’s aesthetics of emotion are given renewed meanings through the channelling of cultural and historical symbols in Japanese contexts. This article argues that Japanese tango musicians create their discourses surrounding tango authenticity at such transnational instances when aesthetics, affect and morality intersect.

From the ideal to the spectacular : Hellenic antiquity and the discourse of authenticity

From the ideal to the spectacular : Hellenic antiquity and the discourse of authenticity

Bound to Capitalism: The Pursuit of Profit and Pleasure in Digital Pornography

This paper explores digital pornography dialectically through a case study of Kink.com, an online BDSM subscription service. It considers the tension between discourses of authenticity that seek to obscure profit motive and shifts in content prompted by market considerations.

Narratives of Here and of Elsewhere in Scottish-Jewish Music: Meyer Fomin and Isaac Hirshow

This article analyzes the role of music in the negotiation of Scottish-Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Glasgow through the lives and work of Isaac Hirshow (1883-1956) and Meyer Fomin (1888-1960), cantors of Garnethill and South Portland Street synagogues, respectively. Both men were born in Vitebsk Guberniya, both established their reputations in Warsaw, and both moved to Glasgow in the early 1920s, remaining there for the rest of their lives. An analysis of these men's parallel journeys suggests a fruitful dialogue between their own backgrounds and the varied identities of their Scottish congregations. Drawing on archive materials, newspaper reports, and musical examples, I therefore explore the ways in which these cantors and their music were both metonymic of a real and known Eastern Europe for immigrant populations, but also metaphoric of an (often fondly) imagined Eastern Other to those for whom roots were often multiple. I then discuss in detail a number of musical texts created by the two men after their arrival in the United Kingdom: a series of commercial recordings made by Fomin in 1922, and a cantata written by Hirshow as part of his 1938 BMus degree. These texts capture a perspective that looks two ways at once—to the “tradition” and history of Eastern Europe, and to the modernity of the West and the acculturation of an immigrant experience. They thus speak to a moment of transition, simultaneously framing and problematizing discourses of authenticity as expressed through material cultural production.

Linguistic Landscape and Authenticity in a Japanese Supermarket in Singapore

AbstractThis study examines the linguistic landscape of a Japanese supermarket in Singapore. Building on linguistic landscape research, this study focuses on cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-culinary exchanges that occur in food spaces. The analysis examines promotional signs and their image, text, typography, format, and the overall retail experience, allowing for a reading of “the semiotic landscape,” or how all the elements work together (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006). What emerges is a dominant discourse of authenticity, identifiable by five types: original, natural, influential, referential, exceptional (Gilmore & Pine 2007), and we propose a sixth type of authenticity: health, which is particularly relevant to food. Health authenticity draws on science to inform consumers of nutrition but is made relatable to shoppers through folklore and local Singapore recipes. The use of Japanese is informative for Japanese shoppers while symbolic for non-Japanese shoppers of a Japan that is pure, authentic, high-quality, and significantly, healthy.

Domain Description: Validating the Interpretation of the TOEFL iBT® Speaking Scores for International Teaching Assistant Screening and Certification Purposes

In the past 2 decades, there has been an increasing tendency to use scores from the TOEFL iBT® Speaking test for decisions regarding the certification of international graduate students as teaching assistants at North American universities. To obtain validity evidence in support of the usefulness of the speaking scores for this secondary use of the test, this study adopted the argument‐based approach to validation. Focusing on the domain description inference in the TOEFL interpretive argument, the study investigated whether the language functions elicited by TOEFL iBT Speaking tasks can be identified in authentic discourse produced by international teaching assistants (ITAs) with different instructional roles. We compiled and analyzed 2 corpora—a TOEFL iBT speech corpus and an ITA speech corpus. The TOEFL corpus contained 2,738 responses to integrated and independent tasks. The ITA corpus of 119 spoken texts included multiple disciplines and 3 instructional genres: lab, recitation, and lecture. The 2 corpora were manually annotated using the knowledge framework (Mohan, 1986), which is a heuristic in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) used to identify knowledge structures (KSs) and language functions based on how linguistic choices function in the discourse. Then, the following types of data were quantitatively analyzed: discourse units annotated per KS category, discourse units annotated per language function, KS categories occurring in each text, language functions occurring in each text, and KSs and functions from each component of the spoken corpora. The corpus data revealed how the language functions were realized and how they varied. Overall, the results indicated that TOEFL iBT Speaking tasks elicit most of the language functions identified in ITA discourse, suggesting that this test accounts for the functional language ability necessary for effective instructional performance as a teaching assistant in the target domain of language use. The discrepancy detected in the use of some functions pertaining to 2 KSs warrants further examination of the extent to which it may impact secondary test use and score interpretation.

EDITORIAL

In the world of historically informed performance (HIP) the word ‘authenticity’ is, if not exactly dead, certainly taboo (‘I know that we shouldn't use the A-word’), fenced in with qualifiers (‘Of course we can't be fully authentic’) or softened to clarify that of course HIP performances are aiming for something less than a full realization of the composer's intentions (‘This may be the way Mozart could have heard it’, or ‘This represents some of the practices of the time’). But at least for the most successful practitioners of HIP (epigones may be a different matter), authenticity discourse was always a significant but simplified version of one part of a more complex and even contradictory set of justifications for using old instruments and techniques. Indeed, HIP practitioners regularly invoke chapter and verse from the treatises or other primary sources in the same breath as claiming not to be interested in authenticity per se or not to be engaged in any kind of ‘reconstruction’. This discursive rupture may be more striking with music of the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the performance-practice sources are more numerous and the scores are more ‘complete’ by modern standards than those of much earlier music, whose performance has always been more frankly imaginative and conjectural.

Leadership in action: an analysis of leadership behaviour in intercultural business meetings

ABSTRACTThis paper problematizes the stereotypical view that leadership is culturally linked and underlines the significant role of subordinates in shaping leadership styles. Employing micro-analytic techniques, the study analyses meetings of two work teams in an international corporation. Findings reveal that although the team leaders are of the same national culture (Swedish), leadership is practiced in a very different manner and can be enacted in ways not adhering to their cultural norms. Moreover, leadership is collaboratively constructed by all participants. This paper highlights the importance of studying authentic leadership discourse and going beyond cultural stereotypes for future research into leadership practices.

Exploring Women’s Work Life Narratives in Search of Authentic Selves

The article investigates the unexplored aspects of the organizational discourses of authenticity in their intersection with the discourses of femininity through an examination of the work life narr...

Negotiating the Relationship Human – Non-Human as a Question of Meaning in Twentieth Century Iranian Authenticity Discourse: The Role of Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad’s Essay West Infection

Abstract The present article investigates the intellectual and discursive orientation of the culture-critical essay West Infection by the twentieth century Iranian writer Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad (1923–1969). In doing so, it likewise discusses the question of why this particular text was to have so deep and lasting an effect in redirecting the sociocultural modernization debate among Iranian intellectuals from a mainly developmentalist discourse to one about the issues of authenticity and identity. While considering Āl-e Aḥmad’s essay as raising a question of meaning – more specifically the question of human being’s meaning in the face of dehumanization under the spell of technological ‘Westernization’ –, we critically examine, in the course of our study, former interpretive approaches that define Āl-e Aḥmad’s text as reflecting influence on the author of existentialist philosophy. At the same time, we also address scholarly discussions of West Infection that regard it as a manifestation of nativism or leftist anti-capitalism. Rather than trying, in our turn, to pin down what Āl-e Aḥmad has to say to any given ideological or philosophical doctrine, we attempt to understand the use by Āl-e Aḥmad, in his essay, of terms such as ‘authenticity’, ‘alienation’, ‘identity’ and ‘religion’ – some of which are highly evocative of existentialism and of nativism indeed – as constitutive of a discourse that – for all the arguable influence on it of modern ideologies and philosophies – deserves to be treated as a word in its own right in the debate about Iran’s sociocultural situation.

(De)constructing distinction: Class inequality and elite authenticity in mediatized food discourse

Orienting to recent work on language materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar) and elite discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017a), I examine the discursive production of class status and the management of distinction/privilege in mediatized food discourse. Specifically, this paper presents a critical discourse analysis of aNew York Timesfood section corpus comprised of 259 articles (e.g. restaurant reviews, celebrity chef profiles, features concerning cooking techniques or trending ingredients, etc.) in which I identify an over‐arching discourse ofelite authenticity. I show how elite authenticity is a key strategy by which distinction is nowadays both (re)produced and (dis)avowed in food discourse, and that it is accomplished via five rhetorical strategies: historicity, simplicity, pioneer spirit, lowbrow appreciation, and locality/sustainability. Thus, food discourse, rooted in familiar bourgeois anxieties and privileges, sustains the post‐class ideologies (Thurlow) and omnivorous consumption (Khan) at the heart of contemporary class formations.

A Tale of Two Tributes: Bowie Remembered at the Grammys and the Brit Awards

This article explores the politics of remembrance through performance tributes and covers of Bowie’s work, specifically the Lady Gaga tribute at The Grammys and Lorde tribute at The BRIT Awards. We consider the specifics of performing cover versions for televised broadcast and post-broadcast, and examine appraisals of both tributes from interdisciplinary perspectives, including popular music, media and gender studies. Each female performer’s tribute and their subsequent reception is examined in terms of how discourses of genre, authenticity, gender and queerness are played out through media commentary. We argue that these appraisals are shaped by notions of authenticity and gender stereotypes, and we explore the decisive role the media plays in shaping public taste and preference. Moreover, we argue that the language used to appraise these tributes reveals expectations around what a cover or a tribute should be, and how it should relate to the artist being remembered. Finally, in analysing the performances by Lady Gaga and Lorde queerly, we acknowledge the extent to which Bowie’s own queer aesthetic has influenced the music and performance personae of both Lady Gaga and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Lorde.