Post-Authenticity: The Collapse of Authentic Blackness in the Post-Soul Memoir

“Oreo,” “white-black,” “Uncle Tom” or “sellout” are just a few of the derogatory terms used to refer to someone who is black but “acts white.” Today more than ever, blackness seems to be a slippery concept, and the proliferation of terms that denote someone who is “inauthentic” go hand in hand with discussions about the (in)authentic blackness of public figures. Although the general trend seems to be that of denying the validity of every notion of racial authenticity, this trend coexists with a need to define blackness, pin it down, establish boundaries, even if these boundaries are accepted as fluid and permeable. My dissertation focuses on an analysis of the notion of “authentic blackness” in African American contemporary memoirs, especially those that can be read as post-soul literature. Specifically, I base my definition of post-soul on the parameters established by Bertram Ashe in 2007, that is, I consider as “post-soul” texts that: - have been written by authors who were born or came of age during or after the Civil Rights Movement and were raised in a multicultural, integrated environment -stage what Ashe calls “blaxploration,” that is a desire to investigate, (re)define and de-essentialize blackness -carry on blaxploration through the execution of “allusion-disruption gestures,” namely the author mentions tropes of traditional blackness, only to contradict them shortly after in order to show the untenable nature of their supposed authenticity. My idea is that the memoir is a privileged genre to investigate authenticity, partly because of the long and complex history of the genre in African American literature, partly because memoirs reflect on what happens when blackness is embodied, and on the consequences of this embodiment in a racist and capitalist society. Aim of the project is to explore racial authenticity in the contemporary scene, keeping in mind how the concept has shifted over time and analyzing how it can be retraced in the production of contemporary African American memoirists. My main argument is that performances of racial identity emerge out of specific sociopolitical situations in which the performer operates, and that these performances are perceived as ineffective or at least insufficient as a tool of identity construction in the contemporary era, so that every notion of authentic blackness is seen as circumstantial, fluid, and ultimately untenable.