Global Tarantella

Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances

Incoronata Inserra

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780252082832
  9780252041297
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252099892
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Brief History of the Tarantella Revival: Exploring Tarantella through the Southern Question Debate
• 2 Exporting Southern Italian Festivals from South to North: The Post-1990s Tammurriata Revival
• 3 Images of the Italian South within and beyond World Music: Eugenio Bennato’s Taranta Power Movement
• 4 Tarantella for U.S., Italian American, and Cosmopolitan Markets: Alessandra Belloni’s Performance from New York City to Honolulu
• Final Thoughts
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index