Subjects, Disavowed: Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories
Rezumat
Abstract: Current European politics of memory and discourses of Europeanness rarely include Europe’s Romani population, despite Romani people’s long history on the continent and their five-hundred-year enslavement on the territory of today’s Romania. The article draws on Michel Rolph Trouillot’s notion of “unthinkable history” in order to address the systematic production of Romani people as unthinkable Others in the European context. I argue that what counts as Europe today mirrors an existing, self-proclaimed “heroic Europe” in the West of the continent that has been shaped by an Occidentalist worldview emerged during Europe’s colonial expansion. Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum was complicit in this project. After embedding the production of Otherness in larger discourses of Europeanness in the first part, the article zooms in on the Roma as unthinkable Others in the second. The final section discusses Acta Comparationis’ ambivalent role with respect to Romani knowledge production as an instance of Occidentalist construction of Europeanness.
Keywords: enslavement, politics of memory, Romani Europeans, Europe, racism, Orientalism, Occidentalism
Acknowledgement: Manuela Boatcă’s work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-18, through the project A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877-1944), PNRR-III-C9-2023-I8-CF 22/27.07.2023, contract no. 760276/26.03.2024.
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