A delightfully ambitious and thought-provoking book, Tracy McMullen's Haunthenticity gives us so much more than a critique of twenty-first century musical reproductions and tribute bands. Above all, this is a book about our fear of the Real, and it offers a more healthy and productive way of living with the Real. At its most stimulating, this book urges us to face the conceptual and affective consequences of living in a world of total flux, a social world of fracture and dislocation. This is what McMullen means by the Real—impermanence, instability, and death. No wonder we fear it. But her book is not nearly so dour as a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. Instead she walks us through a series of intellectual puzzles, with our pathways informed by thinkers ranging from Hegel, Butler, and Baldwin to Susan Sontag and Thich Nhat Hanh. The puzzles start as descriptions of re-performances of Genesis or...

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