Blurb:

In addition to the 28 chapters, this volume has a longer, more substantive Introduction and Afterword that offer a variety of examples exploring what’s at stake in discourses on authenticity and how they are inextricably linked to what Jean-François Bayart terms “operational acts of identification.” The Introduction, through a variety of examples such as self-help books, Coca-Cola, national cuisines, and wine, considers how authenticity rhetoric is employed and commodified, demonstrating just how pervasive it is in our current social worlds. Rather than joining the “authenticity” debates, this volume aims to complicate and problematize discourses of authenticity, which are otherwise left unexamined or even taken at face value, to examine the practical effects and consequences of these claims.