Negotiating authenticity: Three modernities

Post-postmodern authenticity is introduced and used in this conceptual article to characterise a new and emergent approach to negotiating reality and fantasy by tourists through tourism. Alongside modern and postmodern approaches, post-postmodern authenticity contextualises recent developments within authenticity discourse. Modernism involves constructive, objective and verisimilitude stances for negotiating authenticity and inauthenticity, including by tourists through tourism. Postmodernism takes more deconstructive, subjective and hyperreal stances. Post-postmodernism meanwhile, implies reconstructive, performative, and as this article is the first to conceptualise, alterreal stances. The three orientations towards authenticity interact and react off of each other. Unable to address the paradoxes of negotiating reality alone, together, they provide a contextual, extended and holistic conceptualisation of complex authenticity.