Volume 13, Number 2, 2025 Special Issue: Authenticity in Narrative Contexts

EN:

Authenticity in the sense of off-the-cuff, raw, believable presentation of the teller and their everyday life through storytelling has been a widely circulating discourse in digital storytelling (e.g. brand storytelling). In my longitudinal technographic study of stories online, I have explored the connections of this type of authenticity with stories as a feature on platforms (Georgakopoulou 2022). I have shown authenticity to be a platformed directive, supported by specific affordances and design, and integrally connected with the storytelling practice of sharing-life-in-the-moment. These choices have developed recognizability and normativity (i.e. formatting). Building on this research, in this article, I examine how formatted authenticity in stories migrates onto TikTok short form videos. I focus on a series of videos with conventionalized captions “when your/my mum …” that build a generic tale about roles and relationships within the family. Using small stories and positioning analysis, I show how the formatted authenticity that I have attested to in previous work is reconfigured and repurposed at different levels, in line with TikTok affordances for creating multi-layered, intertextual storytelling. The intermingling of the personal with the collective/generic within sharing-life-in-the moment emphasizes the shift of authenticity from teller-based truth-telling to a tale-based relatability. The discussion shows how studying authenticity in social media narratives requires a historical, media-genealogical approach so as to understand the evolution and trans-platformization of storytelling genres and choices that serve as recognizable emblems of authenticity.

EN:

When Oprah Winfrey introduced James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, she described it as “nothing you’ve ever read before” (‘The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night’). A Million Little Pieces recounts Frey’s struggles with substance use and his recovery process in a rehabilitation centre. By sharing a “real” depiction of his character without pulling any punches, Frey was seen as telling an authentic story about substance use. Three months after Oprah’s emotional laudation, an exposé revealed extensive fabrication within the alleged memoir. After the controversy, the book was considered a novel instead of a memoir. This means the text has been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, making it especially suitable for studies into hybrid literary texts. Using data from a larger experiment on fictionality and narrative engagement, this paper will focus on readers who recognised some hybridity in A Million Little Pieces and believed the text to be either autofiction or “based on true events”. The paper examines how readers might come to that conclusion using their lay concept of local and global fictionality and authenticity. The analysis suggests that when there is a lack of paratextual information, readers may fall back on their previous reading experiences to determine the fictionality of the text. Moreover, the use of certain textual dimensions – the text’s origin, its reference, and its stylistic strategy (M. Martínez) – and expressions of trauma in non-standard English (Iatsenko) convey a sense of authenticity, possibly leading to readers believing the text to be non-fictional despite the presence of fictional writing strategies.

EN:

This paper examines practices of digital rebranding, characterised as the strategic overhaul and staged revitalization of one’s digital persona, within wellness influencer cultures on Instagram. Processes of rebranding, which are communicatively afforded by and performatively augmented through platform tools, features and semiotic resources, introduce a narrative disjuncture that requires delicate rhetorical management of self-historicity in relation to neoteric self-presentation practices in order to preserve impressions of authenticity. Drawing on data collected during a longitudinal blended digital ethnographic study, including screen-based participant observations, social media content extraction and oral interviews, I explore the ways in which female wellness influencer-healers discursively (re)negotiate their self-positioning in connection to their current and past digital brands and, relationally, their (imagined) audiences. I suggest that rebranding practices are narratively structured by and, in turn, enact authenticity through discourses of ‘personal growth’ and ‘pedagogical self reflection,’ thereby constructing self-presentational shifts as emergent and organic evolutions in one’s online presence. The paper further argues that digital rebranding manifests from compounded crises of authenticity and tellability, compelling users to continuously recalibrate their online personas in alignment with evolving platform norms and audience expectations. The analysis therefore foregrounds the paradoxical struggle of maintaining a stable personal brand whilst adapting to the dynamic nature of social media.

EN:

Autofiction, often regarded as an innovative means of self-exploration and self-presentation, invites discussions of authenticity. Highlighting the complexity and social value of the notion, I suggest that authenticity is not an outdated ideal that autofiction seeks to transcend; rather, autofiction opens up ways to critically engage with this notion. This potential is realized in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, a work of “biographical autofiction” that proclaims to be “fiction” but does not contain any perceivable elements of invention. Critiquing Genette’s dismissal of biographical autofiction as “veiled autobiography,” I argue that the paratextual label of “fiction” is not a gesture of evasion but a liberating leap that makes space for the author to renegotiate authenticity, a notion that is highly at stake in the narration of domestic violence but systematically denied to female survivors. A close analysis of the work informed by this new metaphor shows that Kandasamy negotiates four forms of authenticity with her autofictional performances: a partial authenticity that recognizes female survivors’ need for self-protection, an emotional authenticity that registers the psychological repercussions of domestic violence, an emergent authenticity that gives women the space to heal and grow, and a collective authenticity that highlights the importance of culturally sanctioned narrative templates. Kandasamy’s work highlights the need to continually scrutinize and renew our ideas of authenticity and shows the constructive role autofiction can play in this process.

EN:

Described as “the predominant narrative environment for contemporary storytellers” (Mäkelä & Meretoja, 2022), social media are attracting increasing attention as sites for the study of a wide range of everyday narrative practices. Moreover, storytelling has become integrated into platform architectures through features such as Stories on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, and is being celebrated as “the ideal vehicle for presenting an authentic self” (Georgakopoulou, 2022). The word authenticity finds its roots in the Greek authentikós, (autós, self) and is associated with notions such as realness, genuineness, credibility and truthfulness (Lacoste, Leimgruber & Breyer, 2014, p2). In interactional sociolinguistics, authenticity is treated as an effect of discursive performance and negotiation of identity between participants in an interaction. The analytical focus is therefore on the discursive strategies and interactional processes that authenticate a person’s claim to a particular identity or group membership. This chapter explores the implications of authenticity as discursive performance in relation to hafu (ハーフ) identities, through a Small Stories (Georgakopoulou, 2013; 2016) analysis of an Instagram account called hafugods. Hafu is a racialised identity term used to describe someone who is mixed-ethnic or mixed-race Japanese, and hafugods presents itself as a space for telling stories about what it means to be hafu. The analysis demonstrates how storytelling is being mobilised for the performance of hafu identities, and reveals how alignment strategies such as ‘ritual appreciation’ and ‘knowing participation’ (Georgakopoulou, 2016) serve as authenticating practices of proving membership to the group, and by extension, a hafu identity. Furthermore, it draws on the concept of ‘enoughness’ (Blommaert & Varis, 2013) – premised on the idea that identities are constructed through discursive orientations towards emblematic features of particular identities that are configured in specific arrangements to emphasise ‘authenticity’ – to illustrate how iterative interactional practices and semiotic resources become established as emblematic of authentic hafu identities in this particular space. Through these analyses, this chapter provides a qualitative account of “how diasporic and transnational people…create discourse spaces in which to articulate marginal voices, negotiate plural identities, construct the meanings and boundaries of community” (Androutsopoulos & Juffermans, 2014, p3), and contributes to the ongoing exploration of the role of social media in mediating collective identifications, constructions of counternarratives and reimagining group identities (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).

EN:

Public intellectuals who belong to a minority are often expected to present an authentic voice for their community. I discuss newspaper columns by Iraqi-born Dutch author Rodaan Al Galidi in which he addresses and thematizes tensions between this explicit expectation of authenticity, and the more implicit expectation that a refugee author should not be too critical of their country of arrival. In small, autobiographic stories, Al Galidi presents his ideas about Dutch society and the refugee condition with the authority of experience, narrating life as an irregular migrant in the Netherlands. Publicly working through his boundary experiences as an outsider in Dutch daily life, he consciously – and, at times provocatively – confronts a privileged audience with the experiences of the underprivileged. The resulting boundary narratives oscillate between two types of authorial ethos: On the one hand, he presents himself in accounts that playfully mix fact and fiction as a picaresque outsider, caring not for the world around him and cherishing the safe space that inauthenticity offers him. On the other hand, readers are to see him as an engaged mouthpiece for refugees and the disenfranchised in general, a public intellectual drawing on his authenticity to speak with authority, and critical of the country he ended up in. For some Dutch readers, these boundary narratives in themselves become a boundary experience.