The Mediterranean Institute is pleased to announce its first session on the Mediterranean Institute Seminar Series for academic year 2017/18. Our first speaker on the Series is Dr Jean-Paul Baldacchino, Head of the Department of Anthropological Sciences and Director of the Mediterranean Institute, who will be discussing ‘Cultural Hybridity and the Mediterranean? Neapolitan Music and Renato Carosone.’

The study of cultural mixture is replete with a complex and fluid vocabulary. The Mediterranean has often been identified as a region defined precisely by its hybridity. In this paper, Dr Jean-Paul Baldacchino will analyse Neapolitan music, and more specifically, the music of Renato Carosone, in light of the postcolonial debate over the hybridity of the Mediterranean. The discourse of hybridity, as Werbner notes, is steeped in a political field that pits cultural purists against cultural innovators. Social scientists and cultural theorists are often implicated in such a political field. The music of Renato Carsone, Dr Baldacchino argues, can function as a useful vehicle to interrogate and challenge the inter-relationship between aesthetic hybridity and unconscious hybridity in the representations of the Mediterranean. 

The Seminar will take place on Thursday 23 November, at 18:00, at the Ir-Razzett tal-Ħursun, University of Malta Msida Campus.

For further information, kindly contact the Seminar convenor, Dr Norbert Bugeja at norbert.bugeja@um.edu.mt.