Romani Studies Research Articles

Roma women serving community sentences in Italy: an analysis through the lens of Critical Criminology and Critical Romani Studies

ABSTRACT This article asserts that it can be analytically expedient to employ and combine aspects of Critical Criminology and Critical Romani Studies in research that analyses the relationship between Roma and the criminal justice system. The resulting approach focuses on criminalization and racialization processes and how they are intertwined, as well as on social construction of representations and on structural discrimination, which is analysed from an intersectional perspective. When applied to research into mothers serving community sentences in Italy, this analytical framework enabled us to highlight forms of discrimination that affect Roma women given non-custodial sentences and show how their relationship with the criminal justice system is influenced by the prevailing cultural constructs regarding gender and motherhood, as well as by racialization processes and class backgrounds.

Can High Involvement of Roma Parents Combat the Impact of Poverty? Resilience and Parental Involvement in the Success of Roma Students at School from the Students’ Perspective

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: A recurring question in Romani studies is why it is difficult to achieve breakthrough successes in inclusion programs. These programs focus mainly on school subjects, although the role of parents is crucial to solving the problem. This study, therefore, concerns parents and their roles in school success. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The purpose of this study is 1) to reveal how Roma and non‑Roma pupils perceive their parents’ involvement (PI) and 2) to come closer to explaining how PI affects students’ school success under the control of other variables. The analysis sheds light on the views of children of Roma and non‑Roma parents in Hungary. Cross‑tabulation analysis and linear regression analysis were applied. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The database called Discovery of Hidden Value of Mentoring (DHVM) was analysed, which includes data from 13–14‑year‑old students (N = 206; 31.1% Roma, 68.9% non‑Roma). RESEARCH RESULTS: For all school‑based and home‑based PI indicators apart from one (parent–teacher conferences), Roma and non‑Roma parents showed the same results. A student’s disadvantaged financial situation most strongly determined their level of school success, overriding the compensatory effect of PI. The variance explained by the regression model was 30.4%, and the model was significant (F(7) 5.18, p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND APPLICABLE VALUE OF RESEARCH: Although financial disadvantage overrides the compensatory effect of PI on school careers and political entities need much action to improve people’s financial situation, schools and families cannot look only to the outside for solutions. The most significant finding of the research is that there is a hidden resource to improve the school success of Roma pupils, namely PI. Based on the results, the schools are recommended to conduct the partner cooperation with parents, because together they can increase the children’s future opportunities and resilience.

Romani American history: Historical absences and their consequences

American historians have created an historical absence by ignoring Romani people’s presence in evidence from the past. The origins of this “absence-ing” are multifaceted and interrelated, but fundamentally stem from the continued influence of out-of-date and unprofessional ways of thinking and knowing. Examining and understanding “absence-ing” requires a consideration of the nature of the discipline of history as well as a history of the missing historicization of Romani Americans. The consequences of the “absence-ing” of Romani people from American histories have negatively and distinctively influenced four different groups of people: historians of the Americas; historians of Romani people in Europe; Romani studies scholars of the Americas who are not historians; and Romani Americans. The harm that each of these four groups experiences builds upon and influences the others. Epistemic injustice is thus perpetuated in linked ways. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Romanies within the interlocking matrix of racialization: How Ciganos in Brazil became accused of introducing an infectious disease

Brazilian medical texts sometimes forge a link between Ciganos (Romanies) and the spread of trachoma, an infectious eye disease. The form of the claim has become standardized into something like this: trachoma was brought to the country in the eighteenth century by Ciganos who were deported from Portugal to the provinces of Maranhão and Ceará. This article traces the origins of this claim to a group of early twentieth-century ophthalmologists from Northeast Brazil, particularly in Ceará. It reveals that several racial projects are folded into the claim and makes a case for the need to approach the dynamics of racialization of Romanies relationally. The analysis of the Romani societal position, characteristics ascribed to them in relation to other communities, and the ways those communities are racialized not only reveals new insights but breaches the continued insularity of Romani studies. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Their Skin Was Their Only Sin: Anti-Roma Murders in Hungary and Austria

On March 16, 2023, a documentary screening and discussion was organized by the Romani Studies Program of Central European University. Máté Fuchs's movie, Unprocessed introduces how Hungarian society dealt with the anti-Roma racist murders committed by neo-Nazis between 2008-2009. The screening was followed by a discussion with Máté Fuchs, Aladár Horváth, Manuela Horvath, and Angéla Kócze, during which the experts shared their insights about trauma and how to deal with it as a society, community, and individually in the Austrian and Hungarian context.

Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka. 2022. Mobilizing Romani Ethnicity: Romani Political Activism in Argentina, Colombia, and Spain. Budapest: CEU Press.

Mobilizing Romani Ethnicity: Romani Political Activism in Argentina, Colombia, and Spain uncovers an under-researched topic, Roma activism in South America, and compares this to Roma political activism in Spain. The trans-continental nature of the comparison is welcome as it reveals processes, institutions, and agency in diverse contexts and how these contexts create opportunities for Roma activism. Almost all studies of/on Roma communities focus on Europe, for obvious reasons, as this is where the largest Romani populations are to be found. Through its novel epistemology and methodology it challenges the Euro-centrism inherent in Romani Studies forcing us to look beyond our immediate surroundings.

Attitudes towards the mother tongue among Roma in Poland

An assumption shared for years by Romani studies scholars is that the Roma language is seminal to the group’s identity. The text is an in-depth analysis of the beliefs of Roma in Poland regarding their mother tongue. The inspiration for this exploration stems from a theoretical model shedding light on correlations between knowledge of the Romani language and the Roma ethnic identity, the model Marushiakova and Popov developed with reference to the situation of Roma in Central Eastern Europe. The paper focuses on the question: What meaning do Roma in Poland assign to knowledge of the Romani language in the construction of their own ethnic identity? The authors argue that irrespective of the fact that the mother tongue currently appears to be a key element of group identity, Romaniness contains the potential to reproduce itself even under circumstances of language abandonment and even among the most conservative Romani groups. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

The gypsylorist as occultist: anti-gypsy stereotypes and the entanglement of esotericism and scholarship in Charles Godfrey Leland’s work on ‘gypsy magic’

ABSTRACT Magic and fortune-telling have been standard elements in stereotypes about Europe’s Romani minorities since the fifteenth century. These stereotypes produced two mutually contradictory images of the Roma: That they possess real occult powers, and that they are frauds. Both images were perpetuated by nineteenth-century ‘gypsylorist’ scholarship, which construed ‘the gypsies’ as Europe’s internal Orientals. This article demonstrates that the most influential gypsylorist author on magic, the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), sought to harmonize the two images through a new theory of magical efficacy – building on established work in folklore as well as his own life-long engagement with esotericism. Leland’s alignment with occultism is a textbook example of the entanglements of esotericism and scholarship in the period. Seeing occultism as a constitutive context for gypsylorist speculation on ‘gypsy magic’ sheds new light on the history of Romani studies and helps explain the perpetuation of anti-gypsy stereotypes in alternative spirituality.

Romani Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Romani Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova, and Aleksandar G. Marinov, eds. Roma Writings. Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II

Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova, and Aleksandar G. Marinov, eds. <i>Roma Writings. Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II</i>

Religious Affiliation as a Political Site of Contestation? Polemical Voices of a New Generation of Romanian Romani Authors*

Abstract The 1990s and the early 2000s was a period of revitalization of the Romani studies in Romania. Participants in the process were non-Roma as well as Roma authors. The religious practices and the affiliations of the Romanies was regarded to be a significant matter to start building a dignified profile of the ethnic group from the perspective of the in - group members who ventured to participate in knowledge production,. If a first generation of Roma intellectuals were more concerned to find corelations and provide explanations in a more or less essentialized fashion, the analysis of the scientific literature authored by a young generation of the in-group members indicate a certain tendency to over-politicize the topic of religiosity and the religious affiliation of the Romanian Romanies. In the process, the Romanian Orthodox Church has been turned into a target. Specifically, the acknowledgment that the dominating religious actor from Romania took part in the perpetuation of the state of slavery of the Romanies makes the Romanian Orthodoxy vulnerable to a series of recent public attacks. This inglorious past is used to symbolically and rhetorically justify the ongoing reaffiliation of the Romanies to neo-Protestant churches. Recognizably, the politicization of the religious affiliation of the minority group was started by a first generation of Romanian Roma intellectuals and the young generation only intensified their attacks. If one considers the in-group knowledge production in a comparative manner, one can realize that a first generation of Romanian Roma intellectuals found it reasonable to accommodate the Romanipen to the religious background dominating in Romania, while a young generation has chosen to overtly and loudly confront the national hegemon religious institution. This is the main trend, but, as I will demonstrate it is not at all a unique approach to the religiosity of the Romanies as undertook by in-group voices. Some Romanian Roma authors have preferred to re-write back to their ethnic and generational peers and to take side with the Romanian Orthodox Church. In their research, the Romanies end up being blamed by a mendacious relation to the religious institution to which the majority Romanian population has been affiliating for centuries. At the same time, the neo-Protestant churches are suspected to act superficially and their missionary work among the Roma communities could be indirectly suggested to represent the convenient meeting ground between two religious scammers. In the present paper I discuss to what extent the new generation of Romanian Roma intellectuals have considered suitable to weaponize the knowledge production on this specific matter and outline the political stakes behind the arguments employed to carry this symbolical and rhetorical battle between in-group narratives.

Antigypsyism, legal culture and sentencing in Italy: A dialogue between sociology of law and critical Romani studies

This article analyses the mutually-influencing relations between the dominant stereotypes about Roma and Sinti people on the one hand, and Italy’s internal legal culture and sentencing on the other, taking an approach characterized by two main elements: 1) this topic is examined in relation to the wider European and Italian historical, political and cultural context, since the way in which legal actors see Roma and Sinti people is strongly related to their social and political setting, and the dominant cultural repertoires historically originated; 2) an interdisciplinary approach is adopted, that ensures an exchange between the literature of jurisprudence and the sociology of law on the one hand with that emerging from contexts like anthropology and Critical Romani Studies on the other, drawing particularly on two important studies coordinated by Leonardo Piasere and on some early findings of an analysis underway concerning Roma mothers serving sentences.

The Romani in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation

The aim of this essay is to present a comprehensive review of the collective monograph Tsygane (The Romani), published in 2018 in the series Narody i kul’tury (Peoples and Cultures). The authors give an overview of the modern developments in Romani studies to acquaint the reader with the background of the reviewed monograph. Every chapter of the monograph is analyzed in detail, taking into account the most recently gathered ethnographic and folklore materials, such as the data recorded by Aleksandr Rusakov and Aleksandr Novik in Leningrad region and in the Balkans (Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Turkey) in the late 1980s and early 2000s–2010s, and the newest publications on the subject, such as a monograph by Evangelia Adamou and Yaron Matras on language contacts, published in 2021.

Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov

Reviewed by: Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov Tomasz Kamusella Roman, Raluca Bianca; Zahova, Sofiya and Marinov, Aleksandar G. (eds). Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II. Brill | Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 2021. xiii + 276 pp. Tables. Figures. Refences. Annexes. £91.82: €109.00: $124.00: open access e-book. The Roma are Europe’s largest stateless minority. Numbering today up to twelve million people, they live across the entire continent, but especially in its eastern half, with most concentrated in the Balkans. Despite having been [End Page 530] part and parcel of European history and culture for a millennium, until the turn of the twenty-first century, the Roma were typically disregarded and marginalized as a ‘non-people’ or a people ‘without culture or history’. In the modern period the Roma have become a target of a variety of state-sponsored ‘civilizing missions’. As a result, they were thoroughly othered and made into paradigmatic ‘foreigners’, ‘non-Europeans’, in essence a ‘colonial population’ that happens to have been ‘misplaced’ in the midst of Europe. Unsurprisingly, the racist sentiment of antitsiganism (antiromism) became the staple of the continent’s politics, on a par with antisemitism. However, this marginalization of the Roma and the erasure of their presence from European history and politics have been more thorough than of the Jews. For instance, it is rarely remembered that Nazi Germany intended to exterminate in their entirety only two peoples, namely, the Jews and Roma. The voluminous Nuremberg Trials proceedings devote just a quarter of a page to the Roma, though during World War Two the Nazis exterminated half of them. Continuing prejudices and stereotypes not only prevent the integration of the Roma, but also hamper rigorous research on them as a European nation. For instance, one would not be able to pass as a legitimate scholar of German history and culture without a working command of German. Yet, this is still a sorry ‘standard’ among specialists of Romani studies. At times, this attitude leads to tragicomic situations. The volume under review is a fruit of the ERC (European Research Council) project, ‘RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars’. The project’s leaders, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, count among the world’s most renowned researchers in the field of Romani studies. Yet, some scholars opined on an early draft of this project that it should be rejected, because the Roma are illiterate and have no interest in books and writing, so there is nothing to be found in the archives or in the form of publications. The project’s first volume, Roma Voices in History: A Sourcebook (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2021), at over one thousand pages, gives the lie to this widespread prejudice, showcasing a mere tenth of the archival documents that were found during the past five years. As members of the RomaInterbellum team, the three editors of Roma Writings represent a new generation of Romani studies scholars. Following Marushiakova and Popov’s inspiring example, they apply these standards and methods of research that are the norm in other fields of Europe’s social sciences. Just as Roma Voices shows that Roma history is part and parcel of European history, so now Roma Writings proves that the development and uses of Roma literature are in synch with their European counterparts. The volume appropriately and inclusively defines Roma literature as the body of writings by Roma authors in Romani and other European languages, including translations into Romani (p. 4). This broad church approach allows them to show that, as in the case of many other Central, Southeastern and Eastern European (CSEEE) [End Page 531] literatures, Roma literature commenced in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 11). The development is in line with the ‘Herderian turn’ that especially after 1918 yielded the region’s ethnolinguistic nation-states. In 1985, the Czechoslovak historian Miroslav Hroch proposed the now widely accepted phase model of the rise of ethnolinguistic national movements. The editors...

Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma

Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma

Marian Devotion among the Roma in Slovakia: A Post-Modern Religious Response to Marginality

Marian Devotion among the Roma in Slovakia: A Post-Modern Religious Response to Marginality

Thematic issue of Romani Studies 33.1/2023

<i>Thematic issue</i> of Romani Studies <i>33.1/2023</i>

Representations of Epistemological Colonization

It can be argued that apart from critically applying the theoretical framework of Postcolonial Studies to Romani Studies, we can effectively describe the position and the history of the European Roma by applying some of the insights of Indigenous Studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s conception of “heterotemporality” may play an important role in the dialogue between postcolonial and indigenous theories, addressing temporal plurality of coexistent cultures. In my paper I argue that the hierarchy of powerful and weak narratives is always inscribed into the heterogeneity of historiographies – that is, the plurality of heterotemporal narratives is always inherently hierarchical, being a political construction. I am discussing Béla Osztojkán’s There is Nobody to Pay Jóska Átyin, the magnificent Hungarian Romani historical novel published in 1997, to trace the representations of epistemological oppression, to explore how the colonized, the Romani subaltern is taking part in the discourse of heterotemporality, and finally to see how the fragmented – “different” – historical knowledge is created and articulated in a literary work.

Black Roma: Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)

This essay brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth-century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of critical Romani studies. By close reading Molière's “Les fourberies de Scapin” (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft, among other objects, through the lens of critical race theory, this essay shows how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy.

Engaging with Decolonisation, Tackling Antigypsyism: Lessons from Teaching Romani Studies at the Central European University in Hungary

In discussions about ‘race’, empire, imperialism – and the decolonisation of the curriculum in European universities – the discipline of Romani Studies has, until recently, been relatively quiet. This article seeks to address this silence and offers commentary on the institutional silences, via both disciplinary historical and contemporary country-specific analysis. A case study is investigated to tease out the ontological and epistemological transitions from early 19th Century Gypsylorism to 21st Century Critical Romani Studies: the teaching and learning of Romani Studies at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. We argue that the legacy of Gypsylorism, as much as the political climate in which the teaching and learning of contemporary Romani Studies occurs, are important aspects to consider. In moving forwards, we suggest that the models and pedagogies adopted at CEU since 2015 offer a useful and critical template for other universities and departments to consider adopting in progressing Romani knowledge production.