Authenticity and Sincerity

Sincerity

Pg. 135 Because Ifem had an accent, Cristina Tomas assumed she couldn't speak English well

Pg. 165 Laura had "an aggressive, unaffectionate interest" in Ifem and Nigeria

Joyce Carol Oates

did not to be seen as only a "women writer"

Toni Morrison

Legacy of being the first African American woman writer to win the Nobel prize

“Social categories get assembled as interpretive devices and decoding techniques for helping us see into otherwise opaque human beings, for reading between the lines of what people might tell us about themselves in search of even more latent truths and certainities. Classifications by race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality are all such shortcuts, templates we use in lieu of absolute interpersonal transparency. We employ them to get at the truth of the world, to get at the real world” (pg. 16-17)

Americanah example: Pg. 4, 5, 8

Sincerity

“Sincerity, however, sets up a different relationship entirely. A mere object could never be sincere, even if it is authentic…. Sincerity presumes a liaison between subjects. Questions of sincerity imply social interlocutors who presume one another’s humanity, interiority, and subjectivity. … In this sense, analyses that deal exclusively with discussions of “racial scripts” dehumanize… They turn us all into mere objects of our own social discourses, less the actors who read and interpret scripts than the inert pages themselves.” (pg. 15)

Jackson's Def. of Sincerity

Authenticity testing

Authenticity

”… These scripts provide guidelines for proper and improper behavior, for legitimate and illegitimate group membership, for social inclusion or ostracism. We use these scripts as easy shorthand for serious causal analysis, and scholars who invoke ‘racial authenticity’ usually do so to talk about how such scripts delimit individuals’ social options…”(pg 13)

Pg. 117 Bartholomew's opinion on what Nigerian wear

Pg. 34-35 Kosi believing and expecting Obinze would cheat

Pg. 431 People expecting Obinze to act like an entitled rich man

Examples from Americanah

“Authenticity explains what is most constraining and potentially self-destructive about identity politics. Kwame Anthony Appiah uses the suggestive model of ‘scripting’ to describe social authenticity’s pitfalls. ‘Collective identities provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people use in shaping their life plans and in telling their stories.’ The problem is that these tales can be both ‘too tightly scripted’ and corrosively mobilized to make social differences appear absolute and natural.” (Real Black, pg 12)

Jackson's Def. of Authenticity

Sincerity

“Sincerity is an attempt to talk about racial subjects and subjectivities. Race is not singularly and exclusively about authenticating others—or, more specifically, it is about authenticating others who concomitantly escape solitary confinement within the pre-scripted categories that others impose. Without absolute social transparency, we use social categories like race to help us grope around in the darkest caverns of our own personal uncertainties. But authenticity tests and racial scripts do not exhaust race’s social import; they just begin a never ending conversation about how the opacity of social identities and individual intentions gets clarified- and only ever temporarily so.”

Authenticity

“Authenticity conjures up images of people, as animate subjects, verifying inanimate objects. Authenticity presupposes this kind of relationship between an independent, thinking subject and a dependent, unthinking thing. The defining association is one of objectification, ‘thingification’” (Real Black, pg. 14)

Americanah Pg. 345-346 Protest for Mr. White and Blaine and Ifem's fight

Authenticity and Sincerity

A conceptual framework for understanding how identity and race are enacted in daily life