Abstract
Eastern Europe’s transition to a neoliberal economy has brought forth new challenges for the integration of the region’s diasporic Romani communities. My work, alongside The Romani Women’s Movement, seeks to conceptualize a national belonging that resists the androcentric and absolutist structures of the modern nation-state. Romani nationhood, tied to an international women’s movement, is a rupture to European universalism because it cannot consolidate the political imaginary of the ideal male subject; a subjecthood whose power is “founded only upon itself,” which in turn naturalizes the exchange of cheap labor power (Balibar, 2016). My project emanates from this rupture, as I aim to circumvent the EU’s appropriation of Romani women’s national efforts within the discipline of cultural studies. Following Cerasela Voiculescu’s ethnographic work with Roma communities in Romania and her theoretical interrogations of neoliberal social integration, this essay intervenes in the epistemic regime of liberal institutional inclusivity to suggest that current methods of social inclusion perpetuate the epistemological recolonization of subaltern voices. I situate the Roma Women’s Movement to provide historical contexts of Balkan Roma navigating the tokenization of their minoritized identities in transnational organizations. I suggest that the granting of liberal citizenship to Roma subjects vis-à-vis neoliberal initiatives of social inclusion secures Euro-colonial hegemony over subaltern subjectivities, effectively silencing Roma scholars from actualizing a heterogeneous, emancipatory political framework. Through this re-interpretation, one can therefore conclude that the fixed and homogeneous representation of Romani women’s vulnerability in human rights discourses helps obscure the necessity of migrant labor in Western European nation-states.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Romani, Communities, Nationhood, Eurocentrism, Neoliberalism, Culture, Identity, Diaspora
