Abstract:

This text will serve as an introduction to a special issue that emerged from the Prague Forum for Romani Histories 2024 Conference on The Racializations of Romani People in the Long Nineteenth-Century. The five articles in this special issue consider the experiences of being racialized, the perpetration of the racialization and the local historical context that gave social meaning to Romani embodied difference in five distinct European locales. This Introduction frames the five articles to reveal both the patterns of prejudice Romani people faced as they encountered nineteenth-century racism, as well as their individual strategies deployed in opposition. It describes how scholarship on nineteenth-century racecraft can be fruitfully placed into conversation with Romani history to enrich both. Though the scholarly study of race has significantly reframed our understanding of the nineteenth century, few historians have explicitly used race as a frame in service of understanding Romani lives. Instead, historians writing about Romani people have most commonly considered their marginalization in other frames, which has tended to localize and isolate circumstances and phenomena from the global realities within which they were embedded. Yet this global foundation set the structures within which assumptions and policies during the nineteenth century bound Romani possibilities on the European continent. An expanded view that posits Romani people as racialized subjects provides unexpected and rewarding insights into both the history of race and Romani history. Without the application of the lens of racialization to Romani history, our understanding of their experiences remains not only incomplete, but even misunderstood.

Bio:

Ann Ostendorf is Professor of History at Gonzaga University in the United States. Her scholarship explores issues of identity, race and culture in early America. Her current research considers the histories of the Romani diaspora throughout the imperial Atlantic world with work appearing in Romani Studies, Early American Studies, Romano Dzaniben, Critical Romani Studies, and Frühneuzeit-Info. Her forthcoming co-edited collection, The Romani Atlantic, will be published with Cambridge University Press next year.

Vita Zalar is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project INHIST - Inclusive History of East-Central Europe. She writes on the history of racial capitalism in Central and East Central Europe through the case of anti-Roma racism in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. Her research integrates social and legal history, conceptual history, and the history of (racial) capitalism.