CDTS Speaker Series: Professor Alessandro Portelli
When and Where
Speakers
Description
About the Lecture:
"Diaspora in reverse? Immigrant folk music in contemporary Italy"
The new urban folk music of Rome is made up of sounds from at least 35 countries throughout all continents and is merging in new urban context as the voice of a new multiethnic working and marginal class, the new “fork” of multiethnic Italy. A project began in 2008 that has created what is probably the largest European archive of immigrant music, which will provide the musical examples presented during the lecture.
About Professor Portelli:
Alessandro Portelli (Rome, 1942) is the founder and president of the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an independent organization for the critical study and promotion of people's cultures, folk music, oral history based in Rome. He has taught Anglo-American Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza and served as city councilìman and Mayor's adviser on historical memory in Rome. His many books range from oral history ("The death of Luigi Trastulli", "They Say in Harlan County"), literature ("The Text and the Voice"), folk and popular music ("Hard Rain: Bob Dylan, folk cultures and the meaning of history").