Manele in Romania

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. Speranţa Rădulescu is an ethnomusicologist at the Peasant Museum in Bucharest and associate professor at the National University of Music–Bucharest. A specialist on lăutar 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”
Speranţa Rădulescu 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 Speranţa Rădulescu
Chapter 4: “How the Music of Manele is Structured”
Speranţa Rădulescu
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 Şchiop
Chapter 8: “‘Boyar in the Helicopter’: Power, Parody, and Carnival in Manea Performances”
Victor Stoichiţă
Chapter 9: “Turbo-Authenticity: An Essay about ‘Manelism’”
Vintilă Mihăilescu
Epilogue
Speranţa Rădulescu