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.

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