Alessandra Ciucci is assistant professor of music at Columbia University.
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, author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past 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, author of The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa