The Voice of the Rural: Music, Poetry, and Masculinity among Migrant Moroccan Men in Umbria

by Alessandra Ciucci

Overview

A moving portrait of the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men.

Umbria is known to most Americans for its picturesque rolling hills and medieval villages, but to the many migrant Moroccan men who travel there, Umbria is better known for the tobacco fields, construction sites, small industries, and the outdoor weekly markets where they work. Marginalized and far from their homes, these men turn to Moroccan traditions of music and poetry that evoke the countryside they have left— l-‘arubiya, or the rural. In this book, Alessandra Ciucci takes us inside the lives of Moroccan workers, unpacking the way they share a particular musical style of the rural to create a sense of home and belonging in a foreign and inhospitable nation. Along the way, she uncovers how this culture of belonging is not just the product of the struggles of migration, but also tied to the reclamation of a noble and virtuous masculine identity that is inaccessible to Moroccan migrants in Italy.
 
The Voice of the Rural allows us to understand the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men by examining their imagined relationship to the rural through sound, shedding new light on the urgent issues of migration and belonging.  
 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226818696
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/25/2022
Series:	Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	307,242
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Alessandra Ciucci is assistant professor of music at Columbia University. 
 

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Note on Names and Transliteration
Introduction
1 The Engendering and the Othering of l-ʿarubi and l-ʿarubiya in Morocco
2 The Voyage: Voicing l-ʿarubiya in the Crossing
3 Spectral Guests, Marocchini, and “Real Men”
4 Longing (ḥnin), Intimacy (rasi rasək), and Belonging (intima): Voicing l-ʿarubiya
Conclusion: Returns
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 

Editorial Reviews

"By maintaining geography, nationalism, race, gender, class, labor exploitation, culture preservation, and loss of the music and voice traditions of the Moroccan old country within the frame, Ciucci paves a new way of understanding the anthropology of work as
a distinct realm of scholarship. The book’s social and linguistic perspectives on the psychology of trauma and the persistent musical habits inherent to migration are novel lenses through which one can view agrarian labor anthropologically. Indeed, Ciucci describes for anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and migrant laborers a way to, together, hold knowledge and build understanding across cultures."
 

Society for the Anthropology of Work

Voicing the Rural is more than a book about North African migration to Europe. With one foot firmly in the vast, phosphate-rich plains region of central Morocco and the other planted in the “urbanized countryside” of central Italy, Alessandra Ciucci vividly explores how Moroccan migrant men use earthy fragments of sung colloquial poetry to open paths between the rural lives they have left in North Africa and the other kinds of rural lives they are creating in Europe.”  

Jonathan Glasser

This is a fascinating and entirely original piece of work. I know of no work in the field that deals in such depth with how critically important music from the home country is to the lives of migrant workers from the Middle East. Ciucci offers us a detailed and fascinating investigation of the multiple ways in which this musical tradition carries meaning for these migrants.” 

Ted Swedenburg