Almost ever since the collapse of state socialism in eastern Europe, the contradictions of popular music genres that combine local and pan-regional forms of musical tradition with contemporary themes and technologies, and that emerged across southeastern Europe in parallel even as the symbolic boundaries of national identity were tightening across the region, have been a staple topic in southeastern European studies not just for the ethnomusicologists who were already researching these simultaneously globalized and localizing mediations of rural and urban everyday life but also for sociologists and historians making sense of the dislocations of postsocialism. A generation later, the politics of turbo folk (the colloquial name projected on to this music, mostly by non-listeners, in the Yugoslav region), chalga (its name with the same valence in Bulgaria), manele (the name it has acquired in Romania, as Costin Moisil explains historically in his contribution to this authoritative volume), or pop-folk (as scholars working in comparative mode across southeastern Europe and indeed the wider post-Ottoman space are likely to call it) are a staple theme in southeastern European media and cultural studies, far more so than equivalent postsocialist musical phenomena in central Europe. Simultaneously, the audience expectations, production contexts, and material conditions of pop-folk have been reshaped by far-reaching structural changes, including the socio-economic effects of many countries in the region seeking and gaining membership in the European Union, the implications of the post-2007 global financial crisis, and the transformations wrought by the internet on media infrastructure, audiovisual communication, and musicians' own careers.

Evidence from Romania, despite the rich amount of research on traditional music and dance conducted by scholars based inside Romania (like Speranţa Rădulescu) and outside it (like Margaret Beissinger)—not to mention those like the book's third editor, Anca Giurchescu, who brought her research to Denmark after defecting from Nikolai Ceauşescu's Romania in 1979 and who sadly died in 2015 while the volume was being prepared—has not seemed to set the pace of transnational pop-folk studies to the same extent as the counterparts of manele in Serbia or Bulgaria. Studies from Romania, like the chapter on muzică orientală that Beissinger contributed to Donna Buchanan's ground-breaking 2007 volume on Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene, nevertheless reveal broadly similar cultural dynamics: a music that sonically, visually, and kinaesthetically attaches the nation to the cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire and the wider region it ruled, standing for the stigmatized yet desired Balkan “east” as a symbolic other to the modernity of “Europe” within the frameworks of “nesting orientalism” (as Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert Hayden termed it) or “balkanism” (Maria Todorova's phrase) that characterized so many narratives of identity across the region during and after the 1990s. Manele, originating in Romani neighborhoods in the 1960s and spreading across Romania as a mass popular music after 1989—when the ethicized and racialized politics of autochthonous Romanian identity under Ceauşescu judged them too Romani to be present in public space—have much in common with the Yugoslav “newly-composed folk music” that spread across the Serbian-Romanian border in the 1980s. They also, however, have important differences dating back to the specific historical experiences of the Romanian provinces' relationship with the Ottoman Empire—meaning that this extensively-researched book is simultaneously in dialogue with works such as The Ottoman Ecumene, an important contribution to the balance between transnational analysis and country-level research in studies of this area.

Manele in Romania consists of nine chapters on the history, structure, performance, language, themes, and economy of manele, its social structures and networks from the postsocialist urban underworld to the business of performance at village weddings, and its parallels with other forms of post-Ottoman ethnopop. The tight editorial work of Beissinger, Rădulescu, and Giurchescu on a project that began in 2011 as a series of public lectures at the National University of Music, Bucharest has woven the work of seven contributors into a book that stands out from many other edited volumes in its thematic coherence, structure, and consistency. Every chapter is deeply rooted in an ethnographic sensibility that takes as its starting point the common sense of the many lăutari (professional male Romani musicians) who have participated in the contributors' research: manele take their real shape in performance, not recording, and much of its artistry and social meaning is only perceptible there. Mass media, by consequence, have little presence in much of the book, with manele seen to be much more about performance, adaptation, and musicians' tailoring their choices of what to play and how to play it to their audience's requests and wallets. The music recorded for purchase on cassette or CD or broadcast on television—what most of its critics will have experienced as manele—is only a watered-down version of manele as social practice; the ability to circulate videos of live performances on the internet, in contrast, has offered vocalists and bands over the last decade more opportunity to advertise their skills.

The richness of grounded knowledge throughout Manele in Romania would distinguish a single-author work in popular and folk music studies, let alone an edited volume. One chapter by Beissinger follows a family band from Muntenia across two decades in their quest to keep up with the synthesizer technology that would allow them to play the most modern and popular manele. Victor Alexandre Stoichiţă and Adrian Schiop offer detailed explanations of the social functions of lyrical expression and dedication in commissioned performance. Its juxtaposition of transnational and national, meanwhile, has wider significance for the interdisciplinary study of southeastern Europe. While the Serbian–Bulgarian pop-folk paradigm (with many contributions from feminist media studies) emphasizes female vocalists, manele performers are predominantly male, a gender difference which Beissinger traces to the history of slavery under Ottoman suzerainty. The Romani men kept by the Romanian principalities' elites as domestic slaves until their emancipation in 1843–56 were the professional and often familial ancestors of lăutari today. If the transnational study of popular music in southeastern Europe is a thriving field, that of slavery and its legacies in the same region is largely still to emerge; and when it does, like every other subject of enquiry that spans past and present borders, it will need to strike the same national-transnational balance as this book. Manele in Romania exemplifies both how committed editors can unify multiple authors' work into a whole and how, when they do so, questions even broader than the immediate topic can emerge.