Manele in Romania

This edited volume examines manele (sing. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even "alien" to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the "manea phenomenon" as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.

Margaret Beissinger teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her research and writing focuses on Balkan cultures and oral traditions, oral epic, and Romani traditional culture and music-making, with an emphasis on southern Romania, where she has undertaken extensive fieldwork both before and after the 1989 revolution, especially among Romani musicians.
Speranta Radulescu is an ethnomusicologist at the Peasant Museum in Bucharest and associate professor at the National University of Music-Bucharest. A specialist on lautar music, she is author of numerous books and articles and supervises the Ethnophonie series (twenty-five CDs so far) that features traditional musics of Romania.
Anca Giurchescu was a dance researcher at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, Bucharest, for 25 years, settling in Denmark and continuing her research with the Danish National Council for Humanities and the Danish Folklore Archives in Copenhagen. She founded the theory and method of structural analysis for traditional dance.

Chapter 1: "Music, Dance, Performance: A Descriptive Analysis of Manele"
Speranta Radulescu and Anca Giurchescu
Chapter 2: "A History of the Manea: The 19th to the Mid-20th Century"
Costin Moisil
Chapter 3: "Actors and Performance"
Anca Giurchescu and Speranta Radulescu
Chapter 4: "How the Music of Manele is Structured"
Speranta Radulescu
Chapter 5: "Village Manele: An Urban Genre in Rural Romania"
Margaret Beissinger
Chapter 6: "Manele and Regional Parallels: Ethnopop in the Balkans"
Margaret Beissinger
Chapter 7:"Manele and the Underworld"
Adrian Schiop
Chapter 8: "'Boyar in the Helicopter': Power, Parody, and Carnival in Manea Performances"
Victor Stoichita
Chapter 9: "Turbo-Authenticity: An Essay about 'Manelism'"
Vintila Mihailescu
Epilogue
Speranta Radulescu