Introduction: Racialized Labour of the Dispossessed as an Endemic Feature of Capitalism

Petrovici, Norbert; Raţ, Cristina; Simionca, Anca; Vincze, Enikő

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76273-9_1

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…During socialism, the Roma were integrated mostly as unskilled workers in a constantly expanding economy, although they continued to live segregated on the outskirts of cities and villages (Ladanyi and Szelenyi, 2006). However, during post-socialism, many of the poor Roma have lost their formal jobs and their growing impoverishment has pushed them along ‘new pathways of exclusion via evictions from gentrifiable zones’ (Petrovici et al, 2019: 19). Berescu (2011, 2019) speaks of the rise of new Roma ghettos throughout Europe, which signals an increase in the number and size of these formations (Kovács, 2015) but also in their fragmentation across urban and rural spaces (Alexandrescu et al, 2021).…”

Section: The Racialisation Of Poverty and The Ghettoisation Of The Romamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More specifically, we claim that the larger processes of neoliberal restructuring do not uniformly target racial or ethnic groups, but that the spatial and racial order of cities is constantly remade by a deeper or subterranean process that Sassen (2014) calls ‘expulsions’. Rather than analysing the emergence of segregated (Roma) communities as only the outcome of the ‘structural features of capitalism’ (Petrovici et al, 2019: 19) or of the politics of ‘racial cities’ (Picker, 2017), we consider the spatialisation of poverty as the outcome of a ‘savage sorting’ (Sassen, 2010). Expulsions involve a constant shifting of ‘winners and losers’ that is more complex than a once-and-for-all process of racialisation and ghettoisation of poor Roma.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘We lurk in the hidden places’: The (un)stable spatialisation of Roma poverty in Romania

Anghel¹,

Alexandrescu²

2022

Urban Studies

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This article studies the urban geographies of Roma poverty by exploring variations in spatialisation. We draw on Sassen’s work on expulsions to argue that the spatialisation of poverty does not always result in a ‘ghetto’. We show instead that the ‘savage sorting’ of winners and losers and the resulting expulsions separate Roma into different levels of (housing) market worthiness. However, this sorting is also shaped by a ‘governance of Gypsy urban areas’ that enables a partial stabilisation of expulsion outcomes. We flesh out these arguments using interviews and observations collected in several Roma ghettos and slum areas from two Transylvanian mid-sized cities in Romania. Our research indicates that the spatialisation of (Roma) poverty is the result of disordering and re-ordering processes, that make it more ruthless, but at the same time politically containable.

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Section: The Racialisation Of Poverty and The Ghettoisation Of The Romamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘We lurk in the hidden places’: The (un)stable spatialisation of Roma poverty in Romania

Anghel¹,

Alexandrescu²

2022

Urban Studies

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“…More specifically, Roy (2017) argues that urban studies too often elide deep histories of racial disposability upon which contemporary neoliberalism rests, and that engagement with other disciplines is requisite in understanding what she describes as ‘racial banishment’, or processes of gentrification in which subaltern people are pushed to the far edges of urban life. Indeed, as work by Petrovici et al suggests (2019: 3–4), to understand postsocialist anti-Roma racism in Cluj, one must attend to histories of Roma slavery (which lasted until 1856 in Romania), 19th-century practices of serfdom and debt bondage, as well as modernisation, industrialisation and agriculture – all of which fed Western capitalism. Roma laboured and lived in pre-socialist Romania as doubly subjugated, racialised as surplus within a region broadly read as exploitable by the West.…”

Section: Questions Of Comparativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, for those who remained in Romania, national racism accumulated. By the 20th century, most Roma still lacked property (Petrovici et al, 2019: 7). Positioned as ‘dangerous’ for ‘the nation’, they were targeted for extermination by the fascist regime.…”

Section: Restituting Racial Banishmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj: Material and allegorical double dispossession

McElroy

2019

Urban Studies

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This paper studies the arrival of digital nomads in Cluj, Romania. I focus upon double dispossession, in which ‘digital nomads’ allegorise technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity on one hand, and in which Roma are evicted to make way for the arrival of Western digital nomads and tech firms on the other. While Roma are materially dispossessed as Cluj siliconises, they are doubly dispossessed by the conjuration of the deracinated digital nomad/Gypsy. As I suggest, this figure discursively drags with it onto-epistemological residues of 19th-century Orientalism – a literary genre that emerged within the heart of Western European empires. The recoding of the nomad today, I argue, indexes the imperiality of technocapitalism, or techno-imperialism. Double dispossession, as a phenomenon, illuminates that prior histories bolster, and are consumed by, globalising techno-imperialism. Postcolonial and postsocialist studies offer frameworks for understanding this update, as well as the accumulative and multifaceted dispossession that siliconisation inheres. I thus argue for a connected rather than comparative approach in understanding double dispossession, one focused upon connections across time, space and genre. A connected approach remains rooted in community organising and housing justice struggles.

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Postsocialism in International Relations: Method and critique

Aradau

2024

Rev. Int. Stud.

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While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

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Introduction: Racialized Labour of the Dispossessed as an Endemic Feature of Capitalism

Cited by 6 publications

References 46 publications

‘We lurk in the hidden places’: The (un)stable spatialisation of Roma poverty in Romania

‘We lurk in the hidden places’: The (un)stable spatialisation of Roma poverty in Romania

Digital nomads in siliconising Cluj: Material and allegorical double dispossession

Postsocialism in International Relations: Method and critique

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