Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories

Despite being present in Europe for centuries, Roma people are still not considered of Europe or addressed as Europeans. Nor are they as a group commonly 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 falls 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 nonwhite 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.

About Manuela Boatca:

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Program at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Currently, she is the Kerstin Hesselgren visiting professor at Södertörn, Uppsala, Lund and Linköping universities. She is the author of Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism, Routledge, 2016 and co-editor of Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches. Her recent coauthored book, Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires, Cornell University Press, 2022 (with Anca Parvulescu), has received the Barrington Moore Award for Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology from the American Sociological Association and the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).