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. Speranta Radulescu is an ethnomusicologist at the Peasant Museum in Bucharest and associate professor at the National University of Music–Bucharest. A specialist on lautar 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.

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.

• Chapter 1: “Music, Dance, Performance: A Descriptive Analysis of Manele” Speranta Radulescu and Anca GiurchescuChapter 2: “A History of the Manea: The 19th to the Mid-20th Century” Costin MoisilChapter 3: “Actors and Performance” Anca Giurchescu and Speranta RadulescuChapter 4: “How the Music of Manele is Structured” Speranta RadulescuChapter 5: “Village Manele: An Urban Genre in Rural Romania” Margaret BeissingerChapter 6: “Manele and Regional Parallels: Ethnopop in the Balkans”Margaret Beissinger Chapter 7:“Manele and the Underworld”Adrian Schiop Chapter 8: “‘Boyar in the Helicopter’: Power, Parody, and Carnival in Manea Performances”Victor StoichitaChapter 9: “Turbo-Authenticity: An Essay about ‘Manelism’”Vintila Mihailescu EpilogueSperanta Radulescu