Jennifer Scappettone. Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism . Columbia University Press, 2025. The barrel organ is a mechanical instrument composed of wooden cylinders encoded with music, which pipes out a melody at the turn of a crank. These mobile music boxes are of uncertain origin: Primitive versions are said to date back to ancient Greece and China, but the first organ to pair a revolving pinned mechanism with pipes and bellows sprang up in 16th-century Holland. The modern barrel organ, with its familiar, decoratively painted box on wheels—the type still sometimes seen in the tourist-heavy piazzas of European cities—was patented by an Italian in Paris in 1892. The barrel organ is also barbaric. In France, its common name is orgue de Barbarie , or “Barbary Organ.” The etymology of this name remains doubtful. It may derive from the organ’s tooting timbre, its barrels producing a cruder sound than the refined, ecclesiastical pipe organ.…