Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Why does the University of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign look as it does today? Drawing on a wealth of research and featuring more than one hundred color photographs, An Illini Place provides an engrossing and beautiful answer to that question. Lex Tate and John Franch trace the story of the university's evolution through its buildings. Oral histories, official reports, dedication programs, and developmental plans both practical and quixotic inform the story. The authors also provide special chapters on campus icons and on the buildings, arenas and other spaces made possible by donors and friends of the university. Adding to the experience is a web companion that includes profiles of the planners, architects, and presidents instrumental in the campus's growth, plus an illustrated inventory of current and former campus plans and buildings.

This second volume of <i>New Italian Migrations to the United States</i> explores the evolution of art and cultural expressions created by and about Italian immigrants and their descendants since 1945. The essays range from an Italian-language radio program that broadcast intimate messages from family members in Italy to the role of immigrant cookbook writers in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture. Other works look at how exoticized actresses like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty; overlooked forms of brain drain; the connections between countries old and new in the works of Michigan self-taught artist Silvio Barile; and folk revival performer Alessandra Belloni's reinterpretation of tarantella dance and music for Italian American women. In the afterword, Anthony Julian Tamburri discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

<p>Contributors: John Allan Cicala, Simone Cinotto, Teresa Fiore, Incoronata (Nadia) Inserra, Laura E. Ruberto, Joseph Sciorra, and Anthony Julian Tamburri.