Staging Genocide: Theatrical Remembering of the Romani Holocaust

Abstract

This article explores performance-centred efforts to remediate the erasure of Romanies from public Holocaust narratives. First, the French play Samudaripen uses aesthetic strategies that emphasize themes of violence and rupture in order to evoke the brutality of Romani persecution under Nazi and Vichy regimes. With its performative elisions between Romani experiences in internment camps in France and concentration camps abroad, Samudaripen connects both historically-specific and fictionalized instances of Romani trauma to broader patterns of anti-Romani persecution past and present. Second, the Romanian-Romani language theatre piece Kali Traš (‘Black Fear’) relays the story of the Romani deportations to camps in Romania in the region of Transnistria under the rule of Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu. Kali Traš pushes back against the silencing of the Romani genocide by reinvigorating the counter-history of the Romani Holocaust in both informative and affectively compelling ways. Each play proclaims Romani agency in commemorative contexts through its narrative and aesthetic strategies. This article shows how Romani artists have engaged in public-facing projects that criticize mainstream Holocaust historiographies and anti-Romani racism more broadly, assessing the extent to which such works constitute valuable additions to Romani struggles for recognition and reparations.