Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories

Lecturer
Manuela Boatcă, University of Freiburg

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German languages and literatures and a PhD in sociology. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In 2018 she was awarded an ACLS collaborative fellowship alongside literary scholar Anca Parvulescu (Washington University in St. Louis, USA), for a comparative project on inter-imperiality in Transylvania. The resulting co-authored book titled Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. In 2025, Professor Boatcă holds the Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting Professorship at Södertörn University.  

Title
Romani Europeans and the Challenge of Unthinkable Histories

Abstract
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 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. 

Information
The seminar will be held in English. 

Please register if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies