As a mother, she was initially appalled, but later became deeply intrigued by the interconnection between visibility, participation, and brands. Sharing a personal experience, Banet-Weiser admits that the book was motivated by her (then) eight-year-old daughter who, with a friend, posted a YouThbe video of themselves and continually came home after school to check how many hits the video received. However, Banet-Weiser observes that the "commercial" has become embedded in the culture of urban lives, including street art, amateur videos, megachurches, yoga, the green buying movement, and various other facets of our lives that have previously been viewed as authentic or real practices. Traditionally, people have believed that what is authentic is precisely that which is not commercial. The book is organized into five relatively discreet chapters that carve out a space to critically examine "how areas of our lives that have historically been considered noncommercial and 'authentic'-namely, religion, creativity, politics, the self-have recently become branded spaces" (p. Banet-Weiser shatters the hackneyed belief that we live in an inauthentic world where people crave authentic experiences. Ambivalence is the liminal space between these two sides where economic imperatives/inauthentic commerce and authenticity co-exist in a love-hate relationship. Authentic is a timely book that stands in opposition to, or as an appropriate critical backdrop to, understanding the hype surrounding self-branding, authenticity, and individuality.īanet-Weiser argues that by resisting the temptation of binary logic and embracing ambivalence we can understand the complex ways in which people live in a branded society.
The central focus of this book is how can we live an authentic life with and through brands. Authenticity appears at odds with branding, yet as Sarah Banet-Weiser argues in her compelling book, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, there are "authentic" branded citizens, branded creativity, branded politics, branded religion, and even branded self-identity. Uthenticity: a word that is seemingly so overused that it.
New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012. Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture.
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