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  • Introduction
  • David Cuthbert (bio)

The essays collected in this issue emerged out of the Canadian Association for American Studies conference held in Winnipeg in October 2003. The conference's program was organized around the topics "Authenticity and Contention" because, at the time of issuing the call for papers, we could not help but recognize the renewed urgency these notions had taken on following the United States government's response to the events of September 11, 2001. The declaration of a war on terrorism, the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, the passage of the first Patriot Act, the identifying of a so-called "axis of evil," and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq had already registered a dramatic shift in the American government's approach towards both its geopolitical role in the world and the regulation and monitoring of its own population. Concerns about national security demanded more intensive internal scrutiny of the origins, identities, and beliefs of American citizens, landed immigrants, and visitors, while potential external threats to the United States were identified as targets for pre-emptive aggression. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and throughout the planning and execution of the military actions that followed, the legitimacy of certain models of national citizenship and political dissent were measured against a coercive ideal of patriotism, which mobilized appeals to an authentically American identity or "American way of life" in order to suppress or disqualify the possibility of critical debate. Any view contesting the policies of the White House administration left itself open to the charge of being inherently "un-American," or even "anti-American."

Although claims to represent or speak in the name of the "authentic" have been the object of considerable contention over the past few decades of intellectual inquiry, the public authority of authenticity appears to have been refurbished for the insecurities [End Page 249] of the new millennium. Even if the value attached to authenticity is understood to have already been thoroughly interrogated and demystified, to have been revealed in essays such as those gathered in this issue to be little more than a performative effect generated through the orchestration of a set of visual or rhetorical postures, it is difficult to deny that these postures have been effectively adapted and set to work in the post-9/11 world. Irony, you may recall, was initially declared to be among the casualties of the World Trade Center attacks, as American periodicals such as Time and Vanity Fair announced the abrupt eclipse of a culture of arch-self-consciousness through a forced confrontation with the absorbing realities of violence, grief, and fear.1 In the academy, preoccupations with the globalizing trajectories of technology and popular culture—embraced, for the most part, in concert with the border-blurring virtues of hybridity, mimicry, and nomadic mobility—were brought up short against the Manichean pronouncements of George W. Bush ("You are either with us or you are with the terrorists") and the re-entrenchment of a worldview in which "evil-doers" remain at large and borders must be secure. More distressing yet is evidence that, while early reports of irony's death may have been greatly exaggerated, long after the fall of the Twin Towers the manifold ironies generated by the Bush administration's response to this event—curtailing civil liberties in the name of "defending freedom"; branding Saddam Hussein as a peerless invidious tyrant, despite the American government's support for his genocidal regime in the 1980s; justifying the invasion of Iraq in the name of bringing democracy to the Middle East, even as American support for autocratic regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia remains unwavering—have failed to provide sufficient critical leverage for those opposed to the administration's actions to avert or alter their execution. As the results of the 2004 American presidential election made clear, the litanies of fear, faith, and patriotism recited by Bush and his cohorts have continued to pre-empt any acknowledgement of the geopolitical world as complex or tending towards contradiction.

Part of the challenge arises from the fact that claims to authenticity secure their authority not through fidelity to a prior truth...

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