Authenticity in North America

Place, Tourism, Heritage, Culture and the Popular Imagination

Jane Lovell, Sam Hitchmough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429802348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

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 across the country, exposing the many commonalities of these different landscapes. Relph stated that nostalgic places are inauthentic, yet within this work several chapters explore how festivals and visitor attractions, which cultivate place heritage appeal, are authenticated by tourists and communities, creating a shared sense of belonging. In a world of hyperreal simulacra, post-truth and fake news, this book bucks the trend by demonstrating that authenticity can be found everywhere: in a mouthful of food, in a few bars of a Beach Boys song, in a statue of a troll, in a diffuse magical atmosphere, in the weirdness of the ungentrified streets.

Written by a range of leading experts, this book offers a contemporary view of American authenticity, tourism, identity and culture. It will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers and academics in Tourism, Geography, History, Cultural Studies, American Studies and Film Studies.

1 The kept weird

US American weird fiction and cities

MC McGrady

USAmerican weird fiction

This essay is best read as a kind of culture and travel guide to important destinations in the psychopolitical landscape of the United States, as the cities of Austin, Santa Cruz, and Portland are tied together by shared patterns of cultural materiality that seem inexorably to erupt in reactionary violence. While ‘the weird’ as such and the ‘kept’ variety of the title have specific textual origins – the former appearing as national and transnational instances of genre fiction in the early 20th century (VanderMeer and VanderMeer, 2012, pp. 5–6) and the latter in the shared slogan ‘Keep [City] Weird’ that emerged in the first years of the 21st (Yardley, 2002; Hoppin, 2013) – the phenomena under discussion here are larger, embodied by the intersectional conflicts arising from the violent maintenance of imperial white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy by state and para-state forces, leftist resistance to this violence and the liberal bourgeois neutralization of this resistance, all filtered through a national identity written alongside the expansion of the country’s borders (first through settler colonialism and then a military empire). With all that in mind, the easiest place to start is at the country’s textual inauguration in the form of the manifesto known as the Declaration of Independence.

The early contours of the USAmerican weird (‘USAmerican’ is used here in lieu of the more common metonymic use of ‘American’ in recognition of the degree to which the latter is part and parcel of the United States’ imperial actions in South America) can be found in the Declaration’s list of ‘repeated injuries and usurpations’ committed by England’s King George III (US 1776). When the Declaration accuses the King of dissolving ‘Representatives Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people’, it not only adopts the still-common patriarchal metonymic use of ‘people’ to mean ‘white male land owners’, but with the term ‘manly firmness’ prefigures the more euphemistic ‘broad shoulders’ preferred by contemporary white male USAmerican politicians when discussing geopolitics (Ross, 2016). With this, the ontological center of what would become the United States is marked out – white men whose claim to a gendered power is already defined by the anxious need to exclaim that power. Against this is not only King George, but also ‘the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’. With this, the basic features of the USAmerican weird are set, as the privileged position of white men is threatened by an inhuman other that defies epistemological limits and emerges from outside the bounds of civilization or meaning.

Two examples from the primordial stages of weird fiction make clear how these themes developed alongside the expanding USAmerican frontier, at least until the genocide of indigenous people in the United States shifted from expansionary military operations to ‘internal’ police functions. The first is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’, published in the April 1835 issue of The New-England Magazine but set in 17th-century Salem Village as a young Puritan journeys to meet a mysterious figure in the forest at night. As Goodman Brown takes ‘a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest’, the landscape outside the village is immediately tied to a teeming, unknowable threat:

It was all as lonely as could be ; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead ; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude. ‘There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,’ said goodman Brown, to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him, as he added, ‘What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!’

(Hawthorne, 1835, p. 250)

When the devil does appear in the form of Brown’s travelling companion, he announces his own participation in the expansion of the frontier, remarking that

I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in king Philip’s war.

(Hawthorne, 1835, p. 251)

Here, the devil does not refute Brown’s impression that the forest holds some unknowable horror, but rather points out that the horror is Brown’s own complicity in colonization, rather than the indigenous victims of that intrusion. The devil goes on to reveal his association with all of New England, claiming that

[t]he deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen, of divers town, make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interests. The governor and I, too – but these are state-secrets.

(Hawthorne, 1835, p. 251)

One can easily extend these associations to the United States more widely by noting the specific act the devil accuses Brown’s father of, as both the first USAmerican president George Washington and his great-grandfather John Washington were given the nickname ‘Conotocarious’ by the Iroquois, which translates to ‘town taker’, ‘burner of towns’, or ‘devourer of villages’ (George Washington’s Mount Vernon, 2018).

The second example is Ambrose Bierce’s, 1897 short story ‘The Eyes of the Panther’, which looks back favorably at the early days of USAmerican colonization even as it expresses the colonial anxieties of miscegenation and racialized cuckoldry in the form of a panther. The equivalent of Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown is Bierce’s Charles Marlowe, who is

of the class, now extinct in this country, of woodmen pioneers – men who found their most acceptable surroundings in sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow, no sooner reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty successors.

(Bierce, 1897)

Here, the effects of colonization on the landscape are clear, as the relationship of white men to the forest and its ‘savage children’ reflects the expansionary assumptions of Manifest Destiny; where once Goodman Brown journeyed into a forest beyond the village-bound limits of white male hegemony, in Bierce’s story, colonizers are reclaiming a landscape that has been usurped by Nature and its indigenous inhabitants. To position Nature as an unnatural imposition on white men’s ‘acreage’ reflects the oxymoronic logic of white settler identity, which must frame the resistance to invasion as an initializing violence rather than a response to the initial violence of invasion.

The racialized threat of sexual violence and cuckoldry appears in the form of a panther that terrorizes Marlowe’s wife and child (unnamed except for the titles ‘the wife’ and ‘Baby’). In the story, the panther never attacks but rather keeps Marlowe’s wife cowering ‘in absolute silence’, with ‘the moments growing to hours, to years, to ages’ as she gradually smothers her baby (Bierce, 1897). Three months after the event she dies in childbirth, though this child – named Irene – grows up to be ‘young, blonde, graceful’ with eyes described as ‘gray-green, long and narrow, with an expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes’ (Bierce, 1897). Despite the three-month gestation that complicates a literal reading, the panther in the story cannot help but appear as an allusion to the perceived threat of miscegenation and racialized sexual violence, particularly as the story’s pre-Civil War setting allows for the possibility that the panther represents an even more complex racialized threat in the form of the maroon communities made up of runaway slaves and indigenous people. This fear eventually leads to Irene’s death, as a rejected suitor shoots her in the night when he apparently mistakes her for a panther, making clear the degree to which white men’s fear of racialized sexual violence is directly tied to their own violence against women.

In the 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie, cultural critic Mark Fisher rejects the notion that Hawthorne or Bierce might be considered part of the weird, comparing them unfavorably in this regard to H.P. Lovecraft and writing that ‘any discussion of weird fiction must begin with Lovecraft’, who wrote for the pulp magazine Weird Tales (pp. 16, 18). Instead, Fisher considers Hawthorne and Bierce to be ‘Gothic novelists’ whose work lacks ‘Lovecraft’s emphasis on the materiality of the anomalous entities in his stories’ (Fisher, 2016, p. 18). Fisher’s expulsion of Hawthorne and Bierce from the catalogue of weird fiction does not by any means indicate a widely accepted boundary for the genre (Bierce, 2018), but the way he focuses on Lovecraft is instructive for appreciating how thoroughly the anxieties that permeate ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘The Eyes of the Panther’ characterize the USAmerican weird.

Although Fisher points to ‘the supreme significance of Lovecraft setting so many of his stories in New England’ while writing many of them in the first person, he never actually connects Lovecraft’s autobiographical geography to the content of his work in any detail (Fisher, 2016, pp. 19–20). This oversight is remarkable because even a cursory consideration would highlight the degree to which Lovecraft’s work reflects the same racial and gender ideology as his precursors, but Fisher proceeds without mentioning Lovecraft’s well-documented racism, even as he remarks on the degree to which Lovecraft’s stories ‘are obsessively fixated on the question of the outside: an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep past, in altered states of consciousness, in bizarre twists in the structure of time’ (Fisher, 2016, p. 16). Fisher’s oversight is only compounded by readings of The Weird and the Eerie that present this dehistoricizing lacuna as a sign of intellectual independence rather than a straightforward lack of the necessary context:

One may pause on the political use of the weird (though perhaps not the eerie) that is found in Fisher’s text. This is not to say he advocates a politics of the weird, but that there are certain aesthetic and affective themes which cannot but eventually be translated, willfully or not, into the political register. While much ado has been made of Lovecraft’s fascism and racism, this has not stopped those who revile his work from banking on his aesthetic-political power. […] Such strategies may perturb the ideological purity of some Leftists, a purity which often results in a paranoia that equates explaining with justifying, engagement with promotion. But these equations are forms of defensive panic which prefer preaching to the choir rather than productively disagreeing.

(Woodard, 2017, p. 1182)

Such a reading is remarkable because it misses the rather obvious point that addressing Lovecraft’s racism makes his work (and thus the weird) more intelligible, not less. This much was made clear by William Hutson of the experimental rap group clipping., who remarked during an interview to promote their ‘Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album’ Splendor & Misery that

H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism is only terrifying if you’re a straight white man and you thought you were the center of the universe anyway. To anyone else – and this is why his racism comes into it – finding out that you’re not the most important thing in the universe is a relief. I think it’s interesting that his characters go mad when they figure out that humanity doesn’t matter. It’s only terrifying if you ever thought you were important, if everything in society has propped you up as the dominant category.

(Burns, 2016)

Hutson’s summary will only become more relevant in the pages to follow as the connections between this earlier literary weird and the kept weird of 21st century USAmerican cities becomes clear.

Civic violence

Aside from a brief mention in the first sentence of the ‘Foreweird’ to The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Michael Moorcock in VanderMeer and VanderMeer, 2012, p. 1), weird fiction in the United States has not been considered alongside the ‘Keep [City] Weird’ slogan, even when the latter has been examined in an academic context (Long, 2010). In fact, there are meaningful interactions between the two, and the kept weird of civic slogans should be considered a particular iteration of the wider phenomenon known as ‘the weird’. That said, it will be most instructive to begin not with the kept weird itself, but rather the political violence that helps define its contours, as seen in three of the various cities closely associated with the weird.

On March 20, 2018, one day before Mark Anthony Conditt killed himself in the suicide bombing outside Austin, Texas that ended his nineteen-day spree, the Associated Press published an article asking, ‘Can Austin stay weird despite the bombs that keep exploding?’ (Weissert and Vertuno, 2018). Published even before the bomber’s identity was known and his association with an extremist evangelical Christian organization made clear (Nashrulla and Jamieson, 2018), the article suggested that the weird of Austin might be the very reason for the bombs in the first place:

The blasts have sent a deep chill through a hipster city known for warm weather, live music, barbeque and, above all, not taking itself too seriously. Could all that make Austin, whose population and economy are booming, whose politics are liberal and whose diversity is rich more likely to be targeted?

(Weissert and Vertuno, 2018)

Before he died, Conditt, who was not from Austin, but rather the neighboring town of Pflugerville, recorded a 25-minute video discussing the bombings, but police declined to release the recording and have only given summary statements regarding its contents, with the Austin Police Chief Brian Manley describing the video as ‘the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point’ (Fernandez et al., 2018). Nevertheless, Conditt’s time in an evangelical home-schooling program and the survivalist group Righteous Invasion of Truth (RIOT), as well as his political writings opposing women’s bodily autonomy and homosexuality (Nasshrulla and Jamieson, 2018) suggest he was quite clearly aligned with precisely that same reactionary white male ontology that characterizes an aversion to the weird in fiction.

In 2013, a similar connection between violence and the civic weird appeared in an article about Santa Cruz, California, asking if the ‘offbeat branding effort [has] gone t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction – Hyper-authenticity
• 1 The kept weird: US American weird fiction and cities
• 2 ‘Something Like a Circus or a Sewer’: the thrill and threat of New York City in American culture
• 3 “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
• 4 Good authentic vibrations: the Beach Boys, California, and Pet Sounds
• 5 A Western skyline I swear I can see: affective critical rurality expressed through contemporary Americana music
• 6 ‘We Sure Didn’t Know’: Laura Gilpin, Mary Ann Nakai, and Cold War politics on the Navajo Nation
• 7 Opening the memory boxes: magical hyperreality, authenticity and the Haida people
• 8 The authenticity paradox and the Western
• 9 Playing at Westworld: gunfighters and saloon girls at the Tombstone Helldorado Festival
• 10 Hidden in the mountains: celebrating Swedish heritage in rural Pennsylvania
• 11 The triumph of trolls: the making, remaking and commercialization of heritage identity
• 12 ‘It is yet too soon to write the history of the Revolution’: fashioning the memory of Thomas Paine
• 13 Familiarity breeds content: shaping the nostalgic drift in postbellum plantation life-writing
• 14 Only going one way? Due South’s role in sustaining Canadian television
• Index