Cultural, ethnic and political dimensions of Mediterraneaness in Neapolitan contemporary music: from a discursive transformation in sounds and lyrics to mobilization against Salvini’s Lega

ABSTRACT

In the Italian public debate, the Mediterranean has represented a discursive formation employed to describe the South as the Other of the North. It has been associated with cultural representations and discourses of civicness that identify the South along a specific set of sociocultural elements, moral norms and forms of civic organization. The Italian city of Naples holds much empirical evidence as an originator of such discursive formation. Since the early 1990s, singer-songwriters attempted to transform stereotypical views of Naples and the South, and to popularize a positive idea of Mediterraneaness on a cultural, ethnic and political dimension. This article aims to explore this process through musical and ethnographic sources, and to discuss the way it is mobilized in forms of protest against racism, xenophobia and the rise of extreme-right in contemporary Italy. Neapolitan artists Eugenio Bennato, Almamegretta, 99 Posse and collective Terroni Uniti provide the case studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Music and politics
• discursive formations
• Southern Question
• Orientalism
• anti-fascism
• Lega Nord

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Alessandro Mazzola http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7484-4220

Notes

1. The author’s translation from: XX Congresso Lega Lombarda, Pontida, May 4, 2003.

2. The author’s translation from: Lega / La secessione c’è già: Garibaldi ha diviso l ‘Africa, non unito l’Italia, Il Nord Quotidiano, September 11, 2013.

3. The author’s translation from: XXIII Congresso Lega Lombarda, Pontida, June 1, 2008.

4. The populist leader also rebranded the party as Lega, removing the word ‘Nord’ in order to mark the change in the party ideology and strategy.

5. Centri sociali is used in Italian language to identify a series of far-left-anarchist squatter communities founded since the mid-1970s, mostly in abandoned buildings in urban inner peripheries. These public centers are important hubs for booth sociocultural activity and grassroots political mobilization in Italian urban settings. An overview of Italy’s centri sociali and a specific description of the sociopolitical profile of Officina 99 is provided by urban sociologist Nick Dines (2012).

6. The controversy between Salvini and centri sociali is widely covered by the Italian press, and reflects the trivialization of the contemporary Italian political debate. Indeed, Salvini has a habit of deriding militants by calling them ‘loser communists’ or ‘shitty ticks’. See for example: http://www.secoloditalia.it/2015/05/i-centri-sociali-impediscono-comizio-salvini-sbrocca-zecche-m/ (last accessed on September 5, 2018).

7. The term tarantella or, more commonly, tarantelle (plural) identifies not only a kind of traditional folk music of the region of Naples, but it is also used as a macrocategory including all traditional and vernacular songs of the Southern Italian area.

8. Interview collected in Naples on June 25, 2015.

9. All the lyrics reported in the article have been translated by the author.

10. Interview collected in Naples on July 29, 2015.

11. Interview collected in Naples on July 31, 2015.

12. The acronym Spa standing for Società Per Azioni is used in Italian bureaucratic language to indicate joint-stock companies.

13. Interview collected in Naples on August 6, 2017.