Yeah You Write: Authenticity and Authority in Katrina Literature
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Eastern Illinois University The Keep Masters Theses Student Theses & Publications 2015 Yeah You Write: AuthentiCity and Authority in Katrina Literature Terri Coleman Eastern Illinois University This research is a product of the graduate program in English at Eastern Illinois University. Find out more about the program. Recommended Citation Coleman, Terri, "Yeah You Write: AuthentiCity and Authority in Katrina Literature" (2015). Masters Theses. 2401. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/2401 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses & Publications at The Keep. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of The Keep. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Date Please submit in duplicate. -------------- ----- - ---------------- --- "Yeah You Write: AuthentiCity and Authority in Katrina Literature" (TITLE) BY Terri Coleman THESIS SUBMIITED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master's of Arts in English IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CHARLESTON, ILLINOIS 2015 YEAR I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THIS THESIS BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE GRADUATE DEGREE CITED ABOVE �r,hs- �. tl-\S- T�E c_JIR DATE DEPARTMENT/SCJ==loo'LCHAIR. DATE OR CHAIR'S DESIGNEE &-1/-/j- \Jt::�I� � THes1s COMMITTEE MEMBER DATE L,;UMMITTEE MEMBER 6/ {I It� .�;;_f!-J_ i I TH:s;sco:ITTE� MEMBER DATE THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER DATE Coleman 1 INTRODUCTION: AUTHENTICITY�AUTHENTI CITY "Authenticity" is a term that has become increasingly ubiquitous in the contemporary American discourse. It pops up in conversations about popular culture and entertainment, 1 2 3 tourism, joumalism, food, education, and politics. In each of these contexts, the concept of authenticity is approached and interpreted differently. It is "a relative concept, materialized within each context with the interaction of its participants" (Shomoossi and Ketabi 149). But authenticity's current buzzword status is not something new. Authenticity has figured prominently in some disciplines and fields for decades. Often, even inside those fields where authenticity has a longer history, a singular definition of the term is lacking. Literary studies is one such field,where diverse, sometimes conflicting definitions of authenticity makeit difficult to understand what writers, theorists, and lay people truly mean when they employ the term. More problematically, the lack of a singular, clearly articulated definition for authenticity sometimes leads to a conflation of authenticity and authentication-that is, the practice of verifying or establishing the credentials of a given object. When authenticity and authentication are conflated in literature and literary scholarship, authenticity-or evaluations of authenticity- often works to tokenize marginalized groups in texts, erase them from texts altogether, or define texts by and about them as unworthy of scholarly engagement. Additionally, evaluations of authenticity can be used to deny marginalized writers their authorial status. In a 2009 lecture, author ChimamandaNgozi Adichie shares an example of a time when her professor employed authenticity, conflated with authentication, to deny her authorial claims 1 See, forexample, discussions of white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's hotly-contested "realness" (Marantz; Butler; Wen). 2 See Rares. 3 See Broersma and Holt. Coleman 2 by invalidating her work. Adichie, who is Nigerian, explains that her American professor thought that the African characters in her novel failed because they too closely resembled him. According to this professor, Adichie's characters-and the book of which they were a part failed because they were not "authentically African." The professor denied Adichie's authority because her story did not align with his knowledge. He could not verify or authenticate her novel's content, and so he dismissed it. Adichie connects her professor's critique of her characters to her discussion of the "single story," a particular narrative that, through privilege enabled repetition andnormalization, comes to be viewed as universal; the single story becomes the authentic story against which all others are verified. According to Adichie, the single story is dangerous. It danger is rooted in how easily it is presented as monolithic truth. The single story creates stereotypes. These stereotypes, Adichie says, are not problematic because they are not truthful. The problem is that "they are incomplete." The single story, by virtue of its singularity, cannot be the whole story. Maddee Clark, a Bundjalong genderqueer person, engages with Adichie's concept of the single story in her essay, "Against Authenticity." Clark laments that conversations about artistic representations of or by queer Indigenous people in her native Australia "[fall] back on familiar narratives around authenticity"; the conversations revolve around a single story of what it real Indigenous people are like. Challenges to representations of and by Indigenous people are not based on content, but, instead, on the Indigenous speaker's or image's "legitimacy" (Clark). But, Clark points out, even support of Indigenous authority, when connected to authenticity, is problematic. This is because authenticity-based bolstering of Indigenous authority "very often fall[ s] into racist tropes of savagery and intolerance" and, as a result, runs the risk of "[replicating] the internal logic of the argument [it seeks] to discredit" (Clark); even celebrations Coleman 3 of authenticity are problematic because they work to further normalize the single story that so limits understandings of what Indigenous people can do or be. Clark argues against authenticity as a concept; for her, the term authenticity is tainted beyond reprieve. While it may be employed to bolster marginalized peoples' claims to agency, it nevertheless fuels epistemologies that counter those same groups. Clark's critique parallels feminist scholar Donna Haraway's discussion of the concept of objectivity. Haraway writes that she and other feminists "have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity" (576). But, by continuing to engage with the concept of objectivity even as they worked to dismantle its marginalizing structures, feminists sometimes became "perversely conjoined with the discourse of many practicing scientists" (579)-the very group whose epistemologies they had set out to work against. Thus, the problem Harawaysee ks to solve in is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material