Third Text, Vol. 22, Issue 3, May, 2008, 297–303
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2008)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820802204235
Picturing ‘Gypsies’:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Roma Representation
Paloma Gay y Blasco
Gypsies/Roma occupy a central place in the collective imagination of the
West. They are objects of both revulsion and fascination and have,
through the centuries, been pictured, narrated and ‘known’ ad nauseam.
The Euro-American obsession with ‘the Gypsy’ raises important issues
regarding the production, authorship and consumption of images of the
subordinate Other – issues that are epitomised by academic and political
debates surrounding the category itself. For some years now, ‘Gypsy’ has
been rejected by many as an exoticising and derogatory term that reflects
the world-views and oppressive practices of the dominant population. In
its place has arisen ‘Roma’, which is meant to reflect the rich heritage
and cultural dignity and distinctiveness of an oppressed but also resisting
people. ‘Roma’ also aims to denote the shared Indian origins, common
history and identity of political interests of what could nonetheless also
be seen as constellation of highly diverse European populations. In this
schema the word ‘Gypsy’ is recognised as a misrepresentation and the
word ‘Roma’ as the more accurate and sensitive way of denoting reality.
And yet ‘Gypsy’, or its local translations such as ‘Gitano’ or ‘Tsigane’,
remains a preferred mode of self-ascription for many individuals and
communities across Europe, either because ‘Roma’ is too new an introduction
or because its connotations of ethnic uniformity make some
uncomfortable. The fact is, the origins and relationship of the various
European groups who are described by others, or describe themselves as
‘Gypsies’ or as ‘Roma’, remain the subject of much debate.
It is impossible and indeed undesirable to impose uniformity in
academic writing about people who call themselves, or are called by
others, ‘Gypsy’, ‘Roma’, ‘Gitano’, ‘Manush’ and so on – the people that
the articles in this issue deal with. The Gitanos (Spanish Gypsies/Roma)
from Madrid among whom I have carried out anthropological research,
for example, would never refer to themselves as ‘Roma’. Some would
consider themselves to be ‘the same people’ (la misma gente) as, for
example, the Kalderari Rom or French Manush discussed by Iulia
Hasdeu and Jean-Luc Poueyto in this issue, but many others would not.
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And so, the authors here have remained faithful to the self-ascriptions of
their informants. We have been mindful of the role that academic writing
on ‘Gypsies’ has played in the reification of this category and of its
deployment in the oppression of the people we are writing about, notably
during the Second World War but also at other times. And yet we are also
well aware of the potential of the term ‘Roma’ to create, in another kind
of reification, reality of a kind that our informants might not necessarily
appreciate. With these caveats very much in mind, in this introduction
I tentatively use ‘Gypsy’ to refer to exoticising and orientalising representations,
and ‘Roma’ to refer to the conglomerate of populations that
would identify themselves as Gypsy, Roma, Gitano, Tsigane and so on.
The difficulties academics and others face in their choice of terminology
obviously touch directly on the issues of representation, authorship
and effect that are the theme of this special issue of Third Text. These
difficulties evidence the productive power of representation, as well as
the impossibility in the Gypsy/Roma case, to clearly delimit the boundaries
of authorship and distinguish between self and Other. It is clear
that in the stories we non-Roma (or Gadje1) tell of Gypsies through literature,
film, photography or museum displays, we find ourselves, our
desires, fears and preoccupations, our shared and individual ontologies
and existential dispositions. And yet as contemporary Euro-Americans,
Roma draw from, contribute to, endorse and challenge the same amorphous
and boundary-less body of imagery as their Gadje neighbours.
The authors in this issue analyse this shared exotic imagination in its
varied visual incarnations, and make a fundamental contribution to our
understanding of the position of Roma in European society and of their
continued marginalisation and domination. Although these writers
speak from very different disciplinary standpoints and examine a wide
variety of social and cultural phenomena, they all problematise the intertwining
of representation, agency and effect in the production and reproduction
of the Roma’s oppression.
In Europe the earliest written and/or pictorial references to Roma or
Roma-like groups date from the fourteenth century for the Eastern countries
and a period spanning the next two hundred years for areas further
to the West and North. Since then, visual representations of Roma have
drawn on a very limited thematic repertoire which has proven remarkably
resilient in both historic and geographic terms. In the sixteenth
century, as today, the wandering, free, musical, thieving, lustful Gypsy
appears at once as uncivilised, animal-like and predatory (and hence in
need of punitive vigilance); and as generous and noble yet child-like (and
hence in need of vigilant socialisation and preservation). As dangerous
outsiders, Gypsies evidence the rightness of a ‘“blood and soil” nationalism’
in which the ‘very idea of a people conjure[s] up images of a
national community with a strong territorial identity’.2 As enlightened
refuseniks they reveal the shortcomings of a political economy which
traps us as it enriches us. These images have instantiated a particular
kind of ‘fascinating cannibalism’3 in which a racialised and gendered
Other ‘in our midst’ is made both to shore up and to challenge the hegemony
of individualism and material accumulation, and the control of the
state. The context to these representations was provided at first by the
fragile growth of the European nation-states and later by the precariousness
of particular regimes. From the beginning of the twentieth century,
1 Gadje is one of the terms
that European Roma use to
refer to the non-Roma.
2 James MacLaughlin, ‘The
political geography of antitraveller
racism in Ireland:
the politics of exclusion
and the geography of
closure’, Political
Geography, 1998, 17:4,
pp 417–35, p 423
3 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The
Third Eye: Race, Cinema,
and Ethnographic
Spectacle, Duke University
Press, Durham, NC, 1996,
p 10
299
control over Roma has repeatedly been made into an index of overall
state control in totalitarian contexts and of state competence and reliability
in democratic regimes.
Throughout these various periods and across the whole of Europe,
Gadje have repeatedly debated their projects of society and the self by
reference to ‘the Gypsies’. From East to West, North to South, ‘the
Gypsy issue’ has periodically galvanised both governmental action and
public opinion. So, for example, during the first years of the twenty-first
century, as twelve post-socialist countries were preparing to join the
European Union, the British tabloids warned of the imminent threat of
a flood of Roma economic migrants from the East. A similar ‘Gypsy
invasion’, which had already been predicted with much fanfare in 1999,
had failed to materialise.4 On both occasions the Roma were described
as parasitic, delinquent and predatory, lured by the beneficence of the
British welfare system which they aimed to exploit, and as therefore
ultimately undeserving and to be kept at bay. In these media depictions
of Central and Eastern European Roma, it was the ‘pull’ and not the
‘push’ factors that were brought to the fore. And, whether or not a
particular group of Roma under consideration was nomadic, it was
their assumed lack of ties with any particular territory, their inherent
lust for wandering and lack of allegiances to anyone but themselves that
were emphasised.
These recent media representations of ‘Gypsy invasions’ draw on an
enduring, pan-European body of Gypsy imagery which recurs throughout
very varied representational contexts and has concrete political effects. At
its core lies the supposed mobility of the Roma, a taken-for-granted
nomadism which turns them into perpetual foreigners. The Gypsies’ radical
Otherness stems from their perceived lack of roots, from the deeply
entrenched assumption that they do not belong here but neither do they
belong anywhere else. As Anikó Imré shows in this issue, the image of
the wandering Gypsy unifies varied cinematic and musical representations
of Roma produced by differently minded European filmmakers and
musicians, many of them Roma themselves. Likewise, the Polish and
Romanian museum exhibitions of ‘traditional Gypsy life’ discussed by
Peter Vermeersch and by Iulia Hasdeu emphasise movement, displaying
caravans and also photographs and paintings of travelling Roma, typically
camped by the side of the road, cooking over a makeshift fire. As
elsewhere, in these museums Roma are portrayed as perpetually passing
by, trapped in an eternal and timeless journey to nowhere. The resilience
and dominance of the image of the wandering Gypsy needs to be investigated
and its effects closely examined, if only because today the majority
of European Roma are not nomadic and because the Roma populations
of many European countries have been sedentary for several centuries.
In literary, artistic and museum representations of Gypsies, nomadism
tends to be portrayed as a joyful alternative to the constraints of
settled life, part and parcel of their assumed ludic disposition, also
evidenced, for example, in their ‘natural’ musical abilities. Likewise in
academic accounts nomadism is often described as a form of resistance,
as in Imre’s analysis of Latcho Drom in this issue. Imre identifies in
Roma film- and music-making a ‘migratory aesthetics’, evidence of
Roma transnationalism so that ‘home becomes something irreducible to
national or other borders’ and is instead ‘inscribed into bodily practices
4 Colin Clark and Elaine
Campbell, ‘“Gypsy
invasion”: a critical
analysis of newspaper
reaction to Czech and
Slovak Romani asylum
seekers in Britain, 1997’,
Romani Studies, 2000,
5:10, pp 23–47
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and sonic spaces’. And yet, the ethnographic and historical records
reveal ample evidence that Roma throughout Europe define themselves
by connection to national, regional and local territories and populations.5
It is also clear, however, that such self-definitions are most often
contested or denied by Gadje and that European states have again and
again undermined any links that Roma might have to the people and
physical and social landscape around them. In Spain, the case with
which I am most familiar, successive governments since the late 1960s
have attempted to solve ‘the Gypsy issue’ by repeatedly and compulsorily
resettling thousands of Gitanos. Since 1992 I have carried out
research among eighty Gitano families who were forcefully moved to a
state-built, isolated, Gitano ghetto in the south of Madrid in 1989. They
all had undergone several government-enforced moves before, from one
shantytown to another every few years. In the autumn of 2006 the
ghetto was demolished and its inhabitants were resettled once again,
some in other state-built ‘Colonies for Special Population’, others in flats
among non-Gitanos. They all knew that this would not be the last time
they would be, as they explained, ‘made to pack up and go, start again
from scratch elsewhere’. ‘The Gadje’, I was told, ‘don’t want us to put
down roots’.
Within a cultural, social and political context in which enfranchisement
results from attachment to the ancestral territory of the nation, the
image of the wandering Gypsy can only be understood as part and parcel
of the dynamics of Roma marginalisation. In their analyses of museum
representations of the Roma in Poland and Romania, both Vermeersch
and Hasdeu demonstrate how this image depends on its opposite, that of
the peasant historically and ancestrally tied to the land. Not only are
national populations represented as ethnically homogenous but their
attachment to the land is conceptualised as unchanging and continuous,
with the result that Roma, viewed as perpetual foreigners and perpetually
in movement, are easily disenfranchised. In his article in this issue
Huub Van Baar eloquently describes the resistance met by Roma activists
in the Czech Republic in their attempts to build memorials on the
sites of Roma concentration camps. Because public remembrance is so
important in European societies as a sign and a symbol of belonging, the
reluctance on the part of the European states to endorse the memorialisation
of the Roma Holocaust can easily be seen as refusal to allow them
to belong to the nation.
And, indeed, across varied representational arenas Roma are consistently
portrayed as outside the nation, as its objects – to be managed and
controlled – rather than its subjects. Their assumed nomadism works
as an index of their broader and irreconcilable deviance. Iulia Hasdeu
tells us that Gypsies are seen to ‘belong to an orgiastic space-time out of
line with normality’. Unlike primitive, rural or working-class Others,
Gypsies are not imagined as ancestors or placed within the same evolutionary
scale as Gadje. Their purpose is to allow Gajde to consider themselves,
not as they once were, but as they could and perhaps even should
be – in Hasdeu’s words, they answer a ‘bacchanalian need’ on the
Gadje’s part. This role that the imagined Gypsy plays in allowing
the Gadje to ponder alternative models of the self is also explored in
Caterina Pasqualino’s analysis of twentieth-century filmic representations
of Roma poverty. European directors from the beginnings of
5 Alaina Lemon, Between
Two Fires: Gypsy
Performance and Romani
Memory from Pushkin to
Post-Socialism, Duke
University Press, Durham,
NC, 2000; Caterina
Pasqualino, Dire le Chant:
Les Gitans Flamencos
d’Andalousie, CNRS,
Paris, 1999; Aspasia
Theodosiou, ‘“Be-longing”
in a “Doubly Occupied
Place”: the Parakalamos
Gypsy Musicians’, Romani
Studies, 2004, 14:1,
pp 15–58.
301
cinema onwards have romantically depicted Gypsies as renouncers and
noble savages, and their penury as evidence of their authentic and
deliberate Gypsyness. By presenting Gypsies as critics of self-interest
and monetary accumulation, these film-makers draw on widespread
European ideas about the redeeming nature of poverty.
If the imagined Gypsy provides us with the tools with which to envision
our alternative selves, the implications of these representations for
Roma groups throughout Europe are concrete and extremely significant.
As Peter Vermeersch emphasises, even when they are intended as acts of
protest against oppression, artistic and museum representations often
draw from and hence reinforce popular representations that place Roma
outside the boundaries of normal society. In Gadje accounts the ludic,
wandering Gypsy is all too easily transformed into the work-shy, thieving,
rapacious economic migrant. And when our sight is directed to the
urban Roma in the inner cities, the archaic travelling Gypsy disappears
and in its place rises the degenerate shanty-town drug-dealer. And there
are also very strong continuities between ideas about Roma that permeate
artistic and museum representations and those deployed in the context of
governance and policy-making. In my research on the policies through
which over the last fifteen years the Spanish state has attempted to deal
with ‘the Gypsy issue’ (la cuestión gitana), the role that these conceptualisations
play in the marginalisation of the Gitanos was all too evident.
Social workers, policy-makers and bureaucrats dealing with urban Roma
insisted to me on the need forcefully to relocate them to isolated housing
states in order to facilitate their compulsory re-education. ‘These
Gitanos’, I was told, ‘are indistinguishable from the most deprived and
problematic of the urban poor. They are not true Gitanos. They are not
nomadic, they have lost all the features that made their ancestors Gitano.’
Because they are ‘chronically immature’ and ‘have no culture’ they have
to be confined to the so-called ‘Housing for Social Integration’, a de facto
punitive institution designed forcefully to concentrate and remove them
from sight.6
Approaching artistic and museum portrayals of Roma from the
perspective of their articulation with representations formulated and
deployed in other contexts draws our attention to the question of effect:
the articles in this issue convincingly portray art and museums as arenas
where the Roma’s deviance is told, and where their marginality is justified
and ultimately reproduced. And yet, in her contribution on photographs
of German Sinti taken during the 1930s, at a time when their
persecution was stepping up, Eve Rosenhaft reminds us of the methodological
difficulties involved in viewing representation as a straightforward
instrument of oppression. Whereas it is easy to read these
photographs a posteriori, solely in the light of the genocide that they
appear to herald, Rosenhaft suggests that we understand them as inherently
multivalent and the product of a negotiated encounter between
photographer and subject. Emphasising the multivocality and negotiated
nature of representation enables us to consider each representational
event, from production to interpretation, as political and framed by relationships
of power that are specific to each situation. This approach
leads us away from a blanket view of Roma as eternal victims, inherently
powerless and unable to produce representations and meaningful
interpretations themselves.
6 Paloma Gay y Blasco,
‘“This is not a place for
civilised people: isolation,
enforced education and
resistance among Spanish
Gypsies’, in Isolation:
Places and Practices of
Exclusion, ed Carolyn
Strange and Alison
Bashford, Routledge,
London–New York, 2003,
pp 208–21
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The analytical standpoint that Rosenhaft suggests is appropriate
because of the difficulties inherent in conceptualising both Roma and
Gadje as either author or subject, agent or object in the process of
representation. Roma belong to Europe both socially and culturally.
Their understandings of the world and their place in it, and their selfrepresentations
and views of the Gadje, draw from and contribute to a
body of images, beliefs and understandings, which is at once resilient
and pan-European, and historically and locally specific. This Roma
engagement with the same concerns that dominate the lives of their nonRoma
neighbours is made clear by the example of the Spanish Gitanos,
whose emphasis on the preservation of female virginity as a sign of
communal identity has been interpreted by literati, artists and scholars
as evidence of their exoticism and foreignness. And yet, throughout the
twentieth century, a similar importance has been given to female sexual
morality by Spaniards. During this period, opposing political parties and
their supporters, as well as religious and social movements, galvanised
themselves around sexual ideologies. For over one hundred years, the
Spanish have deliberately and elaborately reflected upon their sexual
moralities in the public arena, and have made them into symbols of
competing projects of society. Unsurprisingly, living in a world where
shared identities have been for decades explicitly defined through the
management of sexuality and desire, the Gitanos have likewise made of
their own sexual rules the apex of their imagined community.7
Crucially, then, the master symbols in the Gadje conceptualisation of
Gypsies – such as nomadism, poverty and predatory female sexuality –
dominate too the self-representations produced by Roma themselves in
film, music and museum exhibitions. The significant questions to be
asked, therefore, are why are these key motifs so resilient, how do they
move and transform across different milieux, and what are their roles
and their effects in different contexts? These are questions addressed with
originality and analytical rigour by the authors in this issue. Jean-Luc
Poueyto, for example, examines the prominence of the image of the
wandering Gypsy in the artwork produced both by Manush youths in the
South of France and by the now deceased Manush artist Coucou Doerr.
Roma and Gadje, according to Poueyto, share a ‘common exotic imagination’
and it is by drawing on its repertoire that the Manushes represent
to themselves their peripherality to the values of the dominant Gadje
society. Similarly Hasdeu, analysing the portrayal of Gypsy femininity in
a Romanian museum, emphasises the ways in which the eroticisation of
Roma women by Gadje corresponds to the representations of femininity
of her Kalderash informants. However, in spite of this continuity, Gadje
portrayals of Gypsy women are essential to the bacchanalisation of the
Roma, and thus to the reproduction of a cultural politics that places them
outside the boundaries of ‘proper’ culture and humanity.
Emphasising the Roma engagement with European concerns, values
and ideologies raises the question of what the effects are of the representations
of themselves that Roma produce. To what extent do they
attempt to manage to challenge their marginality, and succeed in doing
so, by drawing on an imagery that they share with Gadje? This is a
particularly relevant question, given that, as I have explained above and
the articles here collectively illustrate, this imagery has been and continues
to be instrumental in the marginalisation of Roma. A good vehicle
7 Paloma Gay y Blasco,
Gypsies in Madrid: Sex,
Gender and the
Performance of Identity,
Berg, Oxford, 1999
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for exploring this issue is the analysis of visual representation by Roma
political activists who engage with the international language of human
rights, multiculturalism and integration in the wake of the expansion of
the European Union. Torchin discusses the appropriation of the idiom of
‘integration’ by a Bulgarian Roma NGO deploying documentary as a
political tool. She views these activists as successful in their use of a rhetoric
of integrationist human rights through which ultimately they
manage to ‘articulate and enact belonging’. Vermeersch and Van Baar,
on the other hand, are much more ambivalent in their evaluation. For
both, the multiculturalist discourses that underlie the visual representation
of the Roma past by Polish and Czech activists ultimately work to
naturalise the separation of Roma from Gadje. As elsewhere in Europe,
in Poland and in the Czech Republic the ‘positive’ representation of
Roma that activists advocate will remain ineffective so long as it is not
accompanied by policies that successfully improve their quality of life
and that challenge the institutionalised racism that pervades relations
between Roma and Gadje.
To finish, then, the articles in this special issue of Third Text demonstrate
the necessity to examine carefully the relationship between authorship,
effect and representation when analysing the production of
hierarchy and inequality in Europe. Neither these categories nor their
articulation can be taken as unproblematic when studying representations
of Roma. Indeed, it is the disjunctures, the tensions and the ambiguities
between representation, authorship and effect that prove to be
analytically most promising.
As guest editors of this special issue of Third Text, Dina Iordanova
and I are delighted to have been able to assemble a set of articles of such
high quality. Their authors write from the standpoint of very different
disciplinary and national traditions, and the collection here includes
some of the most incisive thinking on Roma currently being produced in
Britain, continental Europe and the United States. All the articles, except
Anikó Imre’s, were presented in St Andrews in March 2007 at a workshop
on ‘Representation and Effect: The Roma in Politics, Art, and the
Academy’, generously funded by The British Academy.
I am grateful to Peter Vermeersch and Dina Iordanova for their comments on earlier
drafts of this Introduction.