The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures

To what extent has the growing popular demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fueled the expectation that the most important task for regional and ethnic writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material to their readers? In The Romance of Authenticity, Jeff Karem argues that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions that authenticity should be prized as a goal of regional and ethnic literatures, it is in fact a dangerously restrictive category of literary judgment. He draws on a large body of archival evidence to show how intense political and economic interests have determined what literary representations are deemed authentic, not only constraining what such writers can publish but also limiting the ways in which their works are interpreted. The author specifically discusses the work of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Rolando Hinojosa, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Exploring these writers’ different responses to the expectation that they act as cultural representatives of the Southern, Southwestern, African American, Latino, or Native American experience, Karem finds that some refuse that role and others embrace it. The Romance of Authenticity concludes that despite the celebration of hybridity in contemporary theories of identity, the politics of cultural authenticity in publishing and criticism produce precisely the opposite effect, reducing regional and ethnic writers to exotic objects of desire.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/scholbks/1142/thumbnail.jp

The Purloined Islands: Caribbean-U.S. Crosscurrents in Literature and Culture, 1880–1959

The Purloined Islands offers the first book-length exploration of literary and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean during the roughly eighty-year period of their greatest interaction, from the close of the Spanish-American War to the Cuban Revolution. The interconnected histories of colonization, migration, slavery, and political struggle thrust writers from both regions into a vibrant literary conversation across national borders. Jeff Karem charts this dialogue and its patterns of influence through an analysis of key literary and cultural sources in English, French, and Spanish, including a large body of rare archival evidence. What the author identifies in this wide-ranging exchange is the Caribbean’s vital contribution not only to the literatures of the American hemisphere but also to the literary and intellectual culture of the United States itself. Specifically, he shows how such movements as pan-Africanism, the New Negro Renaissance, and pan-American modernism have significant Caribbean roots, although the United States has often failed to recognize them, effectively purloining those resources without acknowledgment. As his title’s allusion to Poe’s The Purloined Letter suggests, Karem argues that the contributions of the Caribbean have been borrowed, appropriated, and nationalized by U.S. culture but are hidden in plain sight. Both its multilingual character and its emphasis on the reciprocity in cultural cross-currents will make the book of interest to readers not only in Caribbean and American cultural and literary studies but also in pan-American or border studies, Black Atlantic studies, and African American studies.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/scholbks/1141/thumbnail.jp

The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures

To what extent has the growing popular demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fueled the expectation that the most important task for regional and ethnic writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material to their readers? In The Romance of Authenticity, Jeff Karem argues that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions that authenticity should be prized as a goal of regional and ethnic literatures, it is in fact a dangerously restrictive category of literary judgment. He draws on a large body of archival evidence to show how intense political and economic interests have determined what literary representations are deemed authentic, not only constraining what such writers can publish but also limiting the ways in which their works are interpreted. The author specifically discusses the work of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Rolando Hinojosa, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Exploring these writers’ different responses to the expectation that they act as cultural representatives of the Southern, Southwestern, African American, Latino, or Native American experience, Karem finds that some refuse that role and others embrace it. The Romance of Authenticity concludes that despite the celebration of hybridity in contemporary theories of identity, the politics of cultural authenticity in publishing and criticism produce precisely the opposite effect, reducing regional and ethnic writers to exotic objects of desire.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/scholbks/1142/thumbnail.jp