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

Sat, November 8, 8:00 to 9:45am, Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Level 1, San Gabriel A (L1)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel works at the intersection between Southern Studies and American studies, using food as a lens. We were struck by Andrew Warnes’ paradigm in his essay from the recent Southern Foodways methodology collection, The Larder, in which the study of Southern food is described as polarized between those who want to excavate and preserve an “authentic” Southern food and those who want to undermine the authenticity of foodways by describing how traditions are “invented.” This responds well to the conference theme of “The Fun and the Fury,” looking at the field of Southern food studies in conflict, with nostalgia and “authenticity” on the one hand and cynicism and “invention” on the other; one focused on celebrating the pleasure of food, and the other on uncovering the pain.

We want to answer the call for a scholarship that does not see authenticity and invention as mutually exclusive approaches. We hope to continue the conversation Warnes began about the complicated relationship between the primacy of pleasure in food memories and the potential for cultural violence of food narratives. To that end, the papers in this panel examine narratives from cookbooks, lifestyle magazines, and other popular texts that make arguments about authenticity, examining the machinery that constructs and supports these arguments. In other words, we want to ask how authenticity is invented.

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