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Instead of debating the objective authenticity of the performances in these festivals, I will investigate the festivals and their component elements as “creative strategies,” to use Stephen Stern’s term (xi–xx), or as “usable pasts,” to use Tad Tuleja’s (7). In either case, the ethnicity, heritage, or traditions displayed during the course of the festivals I am studying are best understood as strategies, creative responses, or makings and remakings of tradition designed to address present concerns, issues, or problems (Stern xi–xii; Tuleja 7). As such, I examine the articulations of ethnicity, tradition, and heritage in each of the five festivals, not to judge them in regards to a principle of objective “authenticity,” but rather to consider to what end ethnicity, tradition, and heritage are employed or deployed in these festivals. Beyond examining how and why they have been employed and deployed, I examine how successful such employments and deployments have been. Some discussion of objective authenticity will be necessary because the actors and organizers of these festivals often refer to “authentic” elements in their festivals. Nevertheless, ultimately, the uses to which heritage, ethnicity, and tradition are put are more important than their constructedness, authenticity, accuracy, spuriousness, and so on. As Tuleja observes, the fact that heritage, ethnicity, and tradition are constructed or invented “no more saps them of constitutive strength than an exposé of Parson Weems’ cherry tree story would invalidate it as a usable legend for American nationalism” (12).
Although “authenticity” is often understood in an objective sense, both by scholars and the actors and organizers in the ethnic festivals, the insight of scholars such as Stern and Tuleja that authenticity is itself constructed and of necessity in dialogue with the present opens up the possibility of other kinds of authenticity, which are not simply matters of objective accuracy. Deborah Che points out that even if objective authenticity could be applied to phenomena such as Holland’s Tulip Time Festival, it would be problematic because such events are “diasporic cultural tourism events, which are products of iterative, fluid hybrid cultures” (262). Che observes that Holland’s founders were part of a Dutch diaspora, and, as such, followed processes of hybridization found in other diasporic cultures.