ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the specific forms that the making of national belonging takes in the contemporary era of post-authoritarian politics, yet it does so by situating the resulting paradoxes in the longer history of official attempts to imagine and project national community. It focuses on authenticity as the result of a process of spontaneous appreciation of something as 'genuine' and 'unaltered'. This brings to the last objective of the chapter: to understand the role that mass media, as technologies of mediation and as institutions, play in the process of authentification and how they complicate official invocations of national community by furthering spectators' subjective experience of local particularity. In this sense, the youth festivals illustrates the link between the historical processes of institutionalising national culture and nation making as an everyday cultural production in which, notably, some members of the national community participate more than others do.
