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Greek Popular Music In An American Cafe, Nancy Sultan

Scholarship

In my last contribution to Laografia (May/June 1994), I wrote about xenitiá and the poetics of pain associated with emigration in Greece. I examined some modern Greek songs along with some ancient Greek poetry to illustrate the long tradition of negativity associated with the idea of xenitiá. In this issue I will approach this same topic from a different angle; I present some results of field research that I conducted in 1987-88 with a group of Greek musicians who performed weekly at the Middle East Café in Cam­bridge, MA.