Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories
Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories
Friday, 11 July 2025: 14:00
Location: SJES029 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
Oral Presentation
Present in Europe for centuries, but still not considered of Europe or addressed as Europeans, the Roma are not part of Europe’s reckoning with either racism or enslavement. Such reckoning routinely restricts
European racism temporally to the Holocaust, conflating racism with antisemitism; and relegates enslavement spatially to Africa and the Americas, equating enslavement with the transatlantic trade. The Roma
fall through these temporal and spatial cracks in Europe’s current politics of memory. I trace this structural oblivion to an Occidentalist imaginary that equates Europeanness with whiteness and that has historically produced unequal Europes in the South and East of the continent to which non-white and other non-conforming populations, histories, and events can routinely be relegated. Drawing on Michel Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the Haitian Revolution as an "unthinkable history" made by enslaved Black people, I argue that European politics of memory will remain incomplete as long as the history and the present of anti-Roma racism, the legacies of Romani enslavement, and the implications of such histories for the (im)possibility of constructing an identity as Romani Europeans are deemed unthinkable in an Occidentalist white Europe.
European racism temporally to the Holocaust, conflating racism with antisemitism; and relegates enslavement spatially to Africa and the Americas, equating enslavement with the transatlantic trade. The Roma
fall through these temporal and spatial cracks in Europe’s current politics of memory. I trace this structural oblivion to an Occidentalist imaginary that equates Europeanness with whiteness and that has historically produced unequal Europes in the South and East of the continent to which non-white and other non-conforming populations, histories, and events can routinely be relegated. Drawing on Michel Rolph Trouillot’s analysis of the Haitian Revolution as an "unthinkable history" made by enslaved Black people, I argue that European politics of memory will remain incomplete as long as the history and the present of anti-Roma racism, the legacies of Romani enslavement, and the implications of such histories for the (im)possibility of constructing an identity as Romani Europeans are deemed unthinkable in an Occidentalist white Europe.