Manele in Romania 2015
Cultural Expression and Social Meaning in Balkan Popular Music
EDITED BY MARGARET BEISSINGER; SPERANTA RADULESCU AND ANCA
GIURCHESCU
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.
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
This extraordinary book has a high applicability both among scholars from various
disciplines and the wider public of those who want to achieve a greater understanding of the
turbulent social reality Southeastern countries are struggling with.
— Folkloristika
The richness of grounded knowledge throughout Manele in Romania would distinguish a
single-author work in popular and folk music studies, let alone an edited volume.
— Slavic Review
To my knowledge, this well-researched book is the very first volume of essays written in
English on the subject of the musical genre of manele. . . The fieldwork completed for the
volume has resulted in a diverse collection of material . . . . Manele in Romania: Cultural
Expression and Meaning in Balkan Popular Music is recommended for scholars, students,
and readers interested in music, history, ethnic, social, and political studies of Romania and
the Balkans. The website [http://www.manele-in-romania.ro/] is a convenient source for
both a classroom setting and personal use.
— Slavic and East European Journal
