Reconsidering Authenticity

Abstract

Postcolonial literature has always faced questions of authenticity aimed at distinguishing literary works that provide genuine representations of a culture from those that rely on cultural exoticism for their appeal. Authenticity is thus used to measure the status of a literary text as a true or fake cultural artefact of a postcolonial nation. However, postcolonial literary critics have questioned the very idea of cultural authenticity and have emphasised the constructed nature of ‘authentic’ cultural traditions. Cultural authenticity has, therefore, not only been rendered ineffective as a measure of a text’s relation to the culture it represents, but has also been questioned as a concept. This paper argues that while cultural authenticity is a problematic concept to be used in the study of postcolonial literature, authenticity in the existentialist sense can provide a basis for discussing and evaluating postcolonial literary works. Instead of seeking to establish a literary work’s cultural authenticity through anthropological or ethnographic reading, postcolonial criticism can use the existentialist concept of authenticity as a framework for discussing the cultural experience of the members of a cultural community. To illustrate this approach, the paper uses Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a literary text that has been both appreciated and criticised on the basis of its cultural authenticity. I argue that what makes the text valuable as a literary piece is not the accuracy of cultural information presented in the text, but rather the story of its main protagonist, Okonkwo, whose determination to live by the values of his ancestral religion and culture leads him to his death. I would therefore recommend the use of existentialist authenticity instead of cultural authenticity in the reading of postcolonial literature. Keywords: Authenticity, culture, existentialism, postcolonial literature, representation