Imagining the Gypsy¹Woman

Abstract

With their big, black, round eyes, the girls of the tribe have a dignified look and a slender bearing; they clap their hands against their bewitching hips with a clink of necklaces, earrings and bracelets. 2

Unequal Citizenship and Ethnic Boundaries in the Migration Experience of Polish Roma

“…The construction of Roma as a people fundamentally different, without history and thus without a future, without an anchor in the physical and social space, has been discussed in much of the literature on the life of the contemporary Roma (Mirga-Kruszelnicka 2018;Kapralski 2007Kapralski , 2012Hasdeu 2008;Vermeersch 2008). In this arsenal of tropes, the stereotype of the eternal wanderer and nomad has been particularly important, as it helps the state to deprive people of their local and national belonging, their homeland, and to deny them a place in society.…”

“…Supposedly, this link is severed in the case of nomads and migrants, or in the highly mobile and diverse settings of modern cities. As scholars note, in case of Roma, sedentary bias plays a decisive role in historical and ethnographic exhibitions depicting Roma as strangers to the local sedentary populations (Hasdeu 2008; Vermeersch 2008).…”

The Roma In New Millennium Italian Fiction Films: Dissensus, Liminality, Emancipation

“…In the main, 21 st century Italian fiction films can be exempted from the criticism that has traditionally been levelled at other cultural representations of the Roma, ranging from the eliciting of an 'enamoured fascination with Gypsy women', which Iulia Hasdeu labels a 'fiction of the Other' (2008: 347), 81 to the romanticizationsometimes by academics -of nomadism as a form of resistance to the 'constraints of a settled life', a notion that Gay y Blasco dismantles in her analysis of the forcible transfers of Roma communities from one urban ghetto to another in countries such as Spain. 82 Both in cinematic and in real-life political terms, the Roma are potentially very engaging subjects; as indicated in this essay, however, until well into the new millennium, the cinematic politicization of the Roma was insufficiently nuanced, relegating them to a marginalized socio-economic degradation which frequently became synonymous with endemic criminality.…”