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ABSTRACTS Charles R. Batson (Union College) Panique celtique, or, Fest-noz in Paname: Manau, Celtic Rap, and Breton Cultural Expression With their Panique celtique receiving a 1999 Victoire de la musique for Album rap ou groove de l'année and classified as a disque diamant for its millions of copies sold, the group of Parisian rapping banlieusards known as Manau configure a Celtic Brittany as a particularly rich site of contestation and revalorization. Drawing on conventions of both rap and Breton musical traditions, Manau's Panique celtique and their follow-up album I engage a strikingly heteroclite blending of this musical and textual heritage. As I propose to show in my analysis of Manau's texts and musical stylings, this "celtic rap" both participates in and disrupts the contestatory, minority identifications at play in the words and sounds of France's banlieues and of the Hexagon's westernmost province. My examinations of Manau's texts show a joining of Brittany's story-telling traditions and rap's poetic resonances, often playful yet manifestly and consciously Other, working from beyond the margins of France's majority expressions. In their musical borrowings, these albums reveal the cultural work of rap to involve the power not only of words but of sonorities. More than chansons à texte, Manau's stylings set in play a musical body that indexes the block parties of the cités and the fest-noz of Breton dance-halls. Through their beat machines and binioux, Manau engage expressions of music and dance whose heteroglossia echoes the multiplicity of the works' textual layerings. It further is this polymorphous expression that points to a France whose differences may combine in radically disruptive ways. My study of Manau's albums also gives rise to an analysis of a certain cultural nostalgia at work in twenty-first century Brittany's historical reconstructions of its musical, choreographic, and linguistic past. As I draw on language offered in recent debates in the field of performance studies concerning both the value of historical borrowings and their contributions to how one might theorize the work and nature of performance itself, I suggest that Manau's work offers more than the clichéd space where "tradition meets modernism" vaunted in much of the press. These two albums may thus point not only to a Breton particularity in which the past, the dead, is seen as remaining to inflect and inform the present, the living: they also may render explicit the multiplicity marking the grain of the performative moment.

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