Historicizing Roma in Central Europe by Shmidt Victoria; Jaworsky Bernadette Nadya;

Author:Shmidt, Victoria; Jaworsky, Bernadette Nadya;
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In terms of adaptation, the racialization of Roma in Central Europe in the early twentieth century moved from the single-track language of reproducing the Grellmannian approach to a multitrack medium for producing new and more complex knowledge.159 The increase in the variety of approaches toward the racial definition of Roma was determined by the pathways taken to indicate the position of peripheral Europe in the global racial order. Paraphrasing Merton, we could say that a racialized view on Roma was shaped by the distinctive and interacting roles of insiders and outsiders who studied the population of Central Europe, which involved interchange, trade-offs and syntheses.160

Eva Blome argues that we should understand the racist theory articulated in Germany between the 1900s and 1930s not “as the result of ‘constructions of race,’ but rather as a driving force for social and cultural processes that involve proclaiming the existence of something called ‘race.’ ”161 Racializing the identity of postcolonial Europe bore a specific genealogy, positing postimperial nostalgia and transferring the label of “barbarism” or non-whiteness to former masters, against the strong Western motive underpinning the “immoral” postcolonial nature of peripheral Europe. In its political demand for nation-building, the whiteness of postcolonial Europe addressed the process of completing deliberation and establishing new pathways for political development aligned with the global racial order. Operating as multiple selection, whiteness introduced the non-linear growth of segregation against those considered exceptionally non-white, namely, Roma.

Anna Laura Stoler has suggested, “The markers of European identity and the criteria for community membership were never fixed. Rather, they defined fluid, permeable, and historically disputed terrain. The colonial politics of exclusion was contingent on constructing categories.”162 This fluidity not only served diverse political interests but also generated a universal, multifaceted platform for legitimizing a particular view of the non-white population. At the moment this fluidity turned toward peripheral Europe, it stopped being contingent, or the adaptation of Western racial theories by peripheral Europe, instead becoming a case of random cannibalization. Three interrelated dimensions shaped the matrix of the inevitable racialization of Roma: (1) the inside/outside vision of postcolonial Europe; (2) the optimistic or pessimistic view on racial mixing; and especially (3) understanding Roma as either isolated or mixed racial groups. Having obtained the position of a signifier of whiteness, the concept of “White Gypsies” reflected the multiplicity of racialized approaches toward Roma, as either non-white due to their isolated purity or because of mixing with other non-white populations, or due to the lack of efforts, both internal and external, aimed at assimilating or whitening Roma. This range of options for justifying the segregation of Roma started to operate as a platform for interrogating the two main streams of theorizing about the non-whiteness of Roma: ascribing Romani degradation to racial intermixture, mainly developed by German anthropologists, and stressing their isolation as the main cause of their intractable non-whiteness, born in the anthropological studies of peripheral Europe. The interrogation between these approaches has fixed the path dependence of racializing Roma until today.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.