"A Little Less History in Our Hearts': Arguing Authenticity without History in Garden & Gun”

• In Event: The Invention of Authenticity: Troubling Narratives of the “Real” Southern Foodways

Abstract

My study takes on the issue of “authenticity” from a rhetorical position. I contend that authenticity is not a measurable quality but a measured argument. New Southern food, in particular, has much invested in arguments of authenticity, in part because the authenticity of these recipes is contested. How can something new, something invented, be authentic?
I take the text for this examination from Garden & Gun, a lifestyle magazine touting the “Soul of the South,” based in Charleston, South Carolina since 2007. The magazine is targeted at the upwardly mobile, emphasizing travel, hunting, interior decoration, and fine dining over home cooking. Garden & Gun’s editorial stance is explicitly “post-race.” Co-founder Pierre Manigault describes the magazine’s version of the South as divorced from its fraught past in “a new golden age”: "We’ve made it through the traumas of racism and integration. ... We have finally gotten past the Civil War. We’ve finally gotten past Reconstruction. It’s a wonderful story to be told, that nobody was telling" (qtd in Elliot). Garden & Gun sees itself as a flagship journal for the newest New South, though its critics are skeptical, accusing the magazine of whitewashing the South, commodifying “the old South plantation fantasy,” and representing only a fraction of the South (Elliot).
Because the magazine has established itself as having “finally gotten past” the burden of Southern history, it cannot rely on the easiest authenticating strategy, a historical origin narrative. A historical narrative would attempt to convince readers that a recipe is truly Southern because it was invented in the South out of uniquely Southern circumstances and eaten by generations of Southerners. However, an appeal to the past would acknowledge the “traumas of racism and integration” that readers had “gotten past.” The solution that Garden & Gun has devised is a combination of textual and visual rhetoric that provides a narrative that is “colorblind” and class blind. This involves a disconnection from historical origin narratives as an authenticating device and a reliance on other narrative patterns.
By looking at special food issues of Garden & Gun magazine, I have identified four narrative strategies used to authenticate its New Southern food recipes. All of the recipes in Garden & Gun are preceded by some kind of narrative introduction. Some are in the voice of the section editor, some in the voice of the contributing chef. On the whole, these introductions rely on narratives about the creation of the dish in the present or near past. There appear to be four narrative strategies for authentication: 1) a personal memory that connects to a communal nostalgia, 2) a description of local, seasonal, and artisanal ingredients 3) an update of a classic as executed by a trained chef, or 4) a narrative of an origin in a Cosmopolitan South. My presentation will explain and offer examples of each strategy, arguing that these strategies at once obfuscate the reality of racial tensions in the present and simultaneously establish a global Southern identity.

Author

• Carrie Tippen, Texas Christian University (TX)