Exporting Southern Italian Festivals from South to North

This chapter presents a fieldwork-based analysis of the tammurriata festivals in the Campania region and in the northern Italian city of Milan. The chapter examines how notions of place and land—main elements in the tammurriata tradition—are being transformed within the current revival to respond to the needs of new festival participants, often urbanites with little knowledge of the tammurriata’s peasant culture. These changes are evident in the introduction of new dance styles and, at least in the core years of the revival in the 1990s, in the combination of traditional elements with urban youth culture. At the same time, the revival has contributed to the emergence of (southern) Italian women performers at center stage. These changes are even more evident when tammurriata moves from the south to the north of Italy, mainly in the large metropolitan center of Milan, where tammurriata is performed together with other tarantella forms and is usually marketed as “ethnic” music. Since southern immigrants make up a large component of Milan’s population, performing or simply participating in a tarantella event in Milan often becomes a way for Campania practitioners to reconnect with their own tammurriata heritage away from home.

The Digital Ukumbi: New Terrains in Swahili Identity and Poetic Dialogue

In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.