1st Edition

Authenticity in North America Place, Tourism, Heritage, Culture and the Popular Imagination

Edited By Jane Lovell, Sam Hitchmough Copyright 2020
220 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

220 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

220 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This interdisciplinary book addresses the highly relevant debates about authenticity in North America, providing a contemporary re-examination of American culture, tourism and commodification of place. Blending social sciences and humanities research skills, it formulates an examination of the geography of authenticity in North America, and brings together studies of both rurality and urbanity... Read more

Introduction Hyper-Authenticity

Jane Lovell and Sam Hitchmough

Chapter One The Kept Weird: US American Weird Fiction and cities

MC McGrady

Chapter Two Something Like a Circus or a Sewer’: The Thrill and Threat of New York City in American Culture

Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson

Chapter Three "That Chinese guy is where you go if you want egg foo yung": Construction and Subversion of Exotic Culinary Authenticity in David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians are Coming

Jiachen Zhang

Chapter Four Good Authentic Vibrations: The Beach Boys, California, and Pet Sounds

Christopher Kirkby

Chapter Five A Western Skyline I swear I can see: affective critical rurality expressed through contemporary Americana music.

Keith Halfacree

Chapter Six We Sure Didn’t Know’: Laura Gilpin, Mary Ann Nakai, and Cold War Politics on the Navajo Nation

Louise Siddons

Chapter Seven Opening the Memory Boxes: Magical Hypereality, Authenticity and the Haida People

Jane Lovell

Chapter Eight The Authenticity Paradox and the Western

Ken Fox

Chapter Nine Playing at Westworld - Gunfighters and Saloon Girls at the Tombstone Helldorado Festival

Warwick Frost and Jennifer Laing

Chapter Ten Hidden in the Mountains: Celebrating Swedish Heritage in Rural Pennsylvania

Katherine Burlingame

Chapter Eleven The Triumph of Trolls: The Making, Re-making and Commercialization of Heritage Identity

Ann Smart Martin. Cortney Anderson-Kramer, and Jared L. Schmidt

Chapter Twelve ‘It is yet too soon to Write the History of the Revolution’: Fashioning the Memory of Thomas Paine

Krysten E. Blackstone

Chapter Thirteen Familiarity breeds content: shaping the nostalgic drift in postbellum plantation life-writing

David Anderson

Chapter Fourteen Only Going One Way? Due South’s Role in Sustaining Canadian Television Linda Knowles

Biography

Dr Jane Lovell worked at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and at Canterbury City Council, where she staged events including sculpture and international light shows. At Canterbury Christ Church University, Jane specialises in teaches Heritage and Creative Industry management and Creative Places. A cultural geographer, visiting fellow at the British Library and Associate Fellow at the UCL Institute of the Americas, she explores tourism, authenticity and places, magical spaces, film locations and researches the light installations that she continues to stage.

Dr Sam Hitchmough is Senior Lecturer in American Indian History at the University of Bristol, where he is also Director of Teaching/Programme Director in the History Department. He was previously Programme Director for American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. His research interests include the Red Power movement, the intersection between patriotism, protest and national narratives, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows in the UK, and the use of American Indian imagery in British popular culture.