Critical Review - Monson (2000)

I have been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of authenticity. After our recent class discussion about essentialism, antiessentialism, and anti-antiessentialism, I realized that the notion of authenticy (as people most often use it) is undeniably essentialist. For something to be culturally authentic, if I understand correctly, it would have to be unique to that culture, unaffected by outside influences that might "taint" the authentic object's cultural purity. In other words, it would have to spring directly from the people as a natural expression of their ultimate essences. Like essentialism, it seems that this perspective of authenticity could easily lead to certain racial or cultural stereotypes.

As Ingrid Monson confirms, "tradition versus modernity has been the pardigmatic opposition shaping discussion of African musics themselves.” (p.9) However, she rejects "the idea of a static African essence in favor of a more continuously redefined and negotiated sense of cultural authenticity that emerges from generation to generation in response to larger geopolitical forces" (p.3). Rather than quarrel about whether something is authentic or not, she argues that people's time would be better spent focusing on how "notions of cultural authenticity and legitimacy are necessarily reinvented in each generation through a process of intergenerational negotiation, contestation, and synthesis" (p.17). This seems as if Monson is regarding authenticity in an anti-antiessentialist perspective: though the concept of authenticity is a social construction, because people view and experience it as a real phenomenon, it becomes "the product of the social practices that supposedly derive from it" (Gilroy 102).

The antiessentialist, on the other hand, might argue that there is no such thing as authenticity at all and that any further pursual of the term is counterproductive. But Monson stresses the importance of “examining that which is taken for authentic and legitimate in particular locations and at particular times" as an important indicator of the interaction between tradition and modernity, which are ultimately inseparable (p.17).

She also suggests that the desire for authenticity, by both the "insiders" and "outsiders" of a culture, reflects a larger global trend of dichotomizing things like race or Western versus Non-Western cultures, while idealizing one side and demonizing the other. In the concept of authenticity often lies the image of an idealized society, contrasted with the "false" and disastrous reality in which we live. Monson talks about the ways "the traditional experience" has become a commodity because of this, but also a way for people oppressed by the Western system and white supremacy to define themselves (or even commodify themselves--strategic essentialism).

Inherent in authenticity is also a power struggle as to who/what is authentic and who/what's not, and who gets to define what "authenticity" is worth--it seems now that "authentic traditional cultures" are just another commodity meant to be admired, experienced (briefly), only to return back to "normal" civilization. I question how the word "authenticity" itself has transformed communities, and for better or for worse?

I also wonder: is the idealization of authenticity (perhaps in the form of "the homeland") inherent in any so-called "Diaspora"? And what role does authenticity play in the struggle for the definition of any ethnic/cultural identity?