Performing in the Italian American “Translation Zone”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
New Age ◽  
World Music ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
United State ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Social

This article explores the work of New-York-based Italian performance artist Alessandra Belloni, particularly her Rhythm Is the Cure workshop featuring Southern-Italian tarantella folk music and dances. Drawing on translation studies scholarship, I analyze Belloni’s adaptation of tarantella for United States and international audiences, particularly World Music and New Age performance circles, while also evaluating the social significance of this project from a feminist perspective. Furthermore, I contextualize Belloni’s work within the Italian American cultural scene and compare her adaptation of tarantella to the work of several Italian and Italian American artists who have contributed to popularize tarantella in the United State since the 1990s.

Tarantella for U.S., Italian American, and Cosmopolitan Markets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Incoronata Inserra
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
American Culture ◽  
New Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Music ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter illustrates the export of tarantella to the United States by focusing on the work of New York–based artist Alessandra Belloni, particularly her tarantella dance performance and her “Rhythm Is the Cure” dance workshop. The chapter examines Belloni’s work both within a world music framework and from a woman-centered, New Age perspective. This work includes a complex process of adaptation of the Southern Italian rhythms, since it enhances an exotic image of Italy as it often emerges in Anglo-American culture, while at the same time adding a woman’s perspective to it. Belloni’s reinterpretation of tarantella plays a particularly significant role within the Italian-American cultural scene. The second part of the chapter situates Belloni’s work within the larger process of post-WWII Italian migration to the United States, while also discussing larger issues of representation of (southern) Italian culture within the Anglo-American context.

Fired by the Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter details the social, political and historical context out of which Italian anarchism emerged in New York City. Embracing a transnational approach, she charts the movement's early roots, its main leaders, geopolitical spaces and distinctive subculture starting from the late nineteenth century when the great Italian immigration to the United States began through the 1920s when the movement started to decline under the blows of governmental repression and postwar nativist calls for 100 percent Americanism.

Drowning Voices and Drowning Shoreline: A Riverside View of the Social and Ecological Impacts of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project

Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather M. Cox ◽  
Brendan G. DeMelle ◽  
Glenn R. Harris ◽  
Christopher P. Lee ◽  
Laura K. Montondo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecological Impacts ◽  
Commercial Vehicles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power Project ◽  
St Lawrence River

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was a massive restructuring of the St. Lawrence River bordering Canada and the United States. The river had always been used for human transportation, and a shipping canal for commercial vehicles was constructed and enhanced throughout the nineteenth century. However, the river grew increasingly incapable of handling an international fleet composed of larger boats during the twentieth century. Proposals to undertake major renovations for shipping were debated at the highest levels of policy for several decades. Finally, the St. Lawrence River was substantially altered during the 1950s. These changes created a Seaway able to accommodate vessels with deeper drafts and permitted the development of hydro-electric generating facilities through the construction of dikes and dams. All of this activity involved numerous agencies in the governments of the United States, Canada, the Iroquois Confederacy, New York, Ontario, other states and provinces, as well as commercial and industrial entities in the private sector.

I Come for to Sing

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-114
Author(s):  
Kevin D. Greene
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Vernacular Music ◽  
Folk Music Revival ◽  
The Way

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

The Comic Grotesque

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-66
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Ethnic Populations ◽  
The Social

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”

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