A Representation of a Representation:
Decolonizing Roma in the eyes of the
Westerner
Assignment: rMA Cultural Analysis – Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Mireille Rosello
Contents
Introduction: But Don’t They Live in Caravans and Travel Around? p. 3 Chapter 1: The Other Colonisation p. 8 Chapter 2: Carmen -‐ The Gypsy Femme Fatale p. 20 Chapter 3: Rom is a Man Like You p. 43
Conclusion p. 66 Bibliography p. 70
Introduction.
But Don’t They Live in Caravans and Travel Around…?
The topic of this thesis can broadly be described as dealing with the representation of Roma by non-‐Roma. However, before I delve into an
explanation of the details of my topic I feel it is necessary to briefly narrate how my interest in Roma representation came about.
Approximately one year ago I travelled to Bulgaria for the first time, to visit a friend who had recently purchased a house in small village called Vodoley, close to the city of Veliko Tarnovo. One day we were discussing the comparatively lower cost of houses in Bulgaria to the UK, when my friend interjected that the reason his house was particularly affordable was because Vodoley is Gypsy-‐ village, which reduced the value of the property compared to villages inhabited by ethnic Bulgarians. Having been unaware that the people I had been
introduced to were Roma, my immediate response was: “They’re Gypsies? But don’t they live in caravans and travel around…?” My familiarity with Roma reached no further than Esmeralda from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat (1998), and the presence of Roma street-‐workers in Norway, where I’m from, which has received considerable media attention in the past few years. Suffice to say that my perception of Roma was at that point entirely shaped by stereotypical representations of ‘Gypsies’1, hence my ignorance in marvelling at the existence of sedentary Roma.
Later that summer I attended a summer school in the Netherlands named Stolen Memories: Museums, Slavery and (De)Coloniality, during which one of the
1 I make use of the term Roma when referring to individuals or groups that can be associated with this group. When
referring to language I use the term Romani. When referring to sources or usage of other terms, such as Gypsy, or cultural motifs, I reflect the original term/motif used when in reference.
professors gave a lecture on serfdom in Eastern Europe, where he briefly touched on the emancipation of Roma from slavery in 1864. Again I was forced to reflect on my own ignorance, as I was completely unaware that slavery had been practiced on the European continent in such a way that mirrored slavery in the Americas – the latter being a mainstay in European school curriculum. Furthermore, I was surprised that, given the focus of the summer school as well as its location, my professor would introduce something as significant as slavery on European ground, only as a passing comment. The combination of coming to terms with my own preconceived perceptions of Roma and discovering the insufficient attention given to their enslavement, even within a context that explicitly sets out to uncover the “stolen memories” of people subjected to slavery, I decided that this was a field into which I had to delve further.
As the largest minority in Europe Roma have a long history of ethnically based prejudices that have resulted in social exclusion, persecution and discrimination. Many of these and associated issues continue today, and have become central issues for governing bodies and institutions. The urgency of these issues are partly reflected in attempts from national and international organisations such as the UN, the EU, as well as development programs such as the Decade of Roma Inclusion, to develop policies that can aid integration and prevent social
exclusion of Roma citizens across Europe. In looking at the focus areas related to minority integration programs there is an emphasis on the necessity to improve living conditions, provide education and social inclusion for Roma. However, the underlying issues of fear, discrimination and hostility between Roma and non-‐ Roma on the level of civil society, continues to hinder the applicability and effectiveness of policy changes. This has been exemplified in the assessment of
the overall failure of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, which ended in 2015 (Decade). What this points towards is the need to investigate practices and perform critical analyses of articulations that reinforce stereotypes grounded in ethnic prejudice that hinder integration of Roma within Europe. As such, I frame this analysis as an argument for the necessity of a humanities-‐centred
contribution towards the promotion of Roma integration. By assessing the effectiveness of critical approaches to Roma representation, the findings of this study could have the potential of raising awareness and offering possible solutions on how to incite change in Roma exclusion from a cultural point of view.
From these incentives, this project has evolved into a desire to interrogate Roma stereotypes, their distribution in media, with a focus on film, and the consequences of their proliferation for Roma integration. Prior to selecting an object for analysis, my research consisted of watching Roma related films, documentaries and news-‐footage in order to form an impression of the
reoccurring tropes. These include, but are not limited to: poverty and poor living conditions; migration, movement and nomadism; speculation on origins; music, dance and clothing; mysticism surrounding ‘Gypsy’ culture; myths, legends and associated stereotypes such as baby-‐snatchers, thieves, magicians and fortune-‐ tellers. These tropes tend to be presented with the varying sentiments of
exoticism, alterity, condemnation both of Roma characteristics and of oppressive or discriminatory acts against Roma. My contention surrounding these tropes is their derivative essence. By focusing the lens on Roma as subject matter, I found that audio-‐visual media tend to perform a representation of a representation, in which the visual and textual tropes that form the substance of documentation is
predetermined based on and derived from stereotypes which the viewer often has some affinity to. This is equally true of both fictional and factual based documentation. The consequence of these tendencies is the construction and perpetuation of Roma as inherently ‘other;’ an essentialised and orientalised entity that stands in binary with modern Western society. This is preceded and succeeded by colonising acts against Roma since their arrival in Europe, many of which have been largely unacknowledged within academic and educational contexts. I characterise these issues as a two-‐dimensional colonisation: of Roma physically and historically, as well as of Roma representation. My guiding question for the thesis as a whole is: Why should Roma representation be decolonised? And how?
With these ideas in mind, I will proceed to give a brief overview of the three chapters that make up this thesis, the objects that form the focus of each chapter and the concepts I employ to investigate them.
In Chapter 1 I introduce decoloniality as the overarching discourse within which the thesis as a whole is situated. This includes a justification for the relevance of decoloniality, as opposed to post-‐colonialism, as a theoretical framework applicable to investigating colonising acts against Roma. Intrinsic to this chapter is my claim that Roma were colonised, which justifies the
applicability of decolonial theory. I conceive of this chapter as a delayed
response to the general omission of Roma during the decolonial summer school I attended last summer, and ask: Why should Roma be considered as potential decolonial subjects?
In Chapter 2 I address the fictional figure of Carmen, a Roma from Andalusia in Spain, whose image has become so pervasive as to dominate the association
one gets when invoking the ‘Gypsy femme fatale.’ By looking at the original source, a novella by French writer Prosper Mérimée, and comparing this to two cinematic adaptations, I investigate the function of her portrayal as a
colonisation of Roma representation. By locating moments of resistance within her narrative I employ decolonial feminism as a way of disrupting the colonising narrative, and suggest a reading that accommodates for both post-‐colonial and feminist interpretations.
Finally, in Chapter 3 I sought out an object that encapsulates my contentions about stereotypical representations whilst simultaneously offering an
alternative mode that moves beyond the recycling of conventional Roma stereotypes. The object of this analysis will be Menelaos Karamaghiolis’
documentary ROM (1989), created and released for the Greek national television channel, ERT1. The film is based around four narrative voices, both Roma and non-‐Roma, that offer differing perspectives, accounts and impressions of Roma history, tradition, culture and current conditions. My research question for this chapter will be: Can ROM be described as having a decolonial approach to Roma representation?
Chapter 1.
The Other Colonisation
In wishing to commence by outlining a brief history of Roma, from their origins until today, I am instantly entering a territory rife with misconception and contestation. Given the stereotype that claims Roma have no history2, or have no care for one, one could even argue that simply to propose a history is already a contesting narrative. Furthermore, the marginal status of Roma worldwide, combined with the fact that Roma have no ‘homeland’ per se, and until the last 50 years, have had no official representative body or affiliation, has meant that as a group, Roma have received limited attention within the academic fields such as postcolonial studies. The absence of territory and migratory or nomadic lifestyle means Roma were not colonised; in the sense that their territory was not invaded and subjugated. According to Ashton-‐Smith, the
absence of texts or media of any kind that can be considered postcolonial or that may reflect the impact of colonialism disqualifies their entry into the
postcolonial field “since to become postcolonial would require them to engage with their collective past” (74). The presumptuous claim that Roma actively do not engage with their past, a presumption Aston-‐Smith goes on to critique, is one of the many hackneyed impressions surrounding Roma to be dealt with in this analysis.
Despite their neglect within postcolonialism, the interdisciplinary field of Romani Studies is today an emerging academic field, which has done a great deal to bring the study of Roma into academia. This thesis draws largely on the field
2 Huub van Baar cites the following scholars who have made this claim to varying degrees: B. Quintana and L. G. Floyd
¡Qué gitano! Gypsies of Southern Spain (1972); Inge Clendinnen Reading the Holocaust (1999); Paloma Gay y Blasco Gypsies in Madrid: Sex, Gender and the Performance of Identity (1999); Michael Stewart The Time of the Gypsies (1997);
James Scott The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) (van Baar 2011: 273-‐276). Ashton-‐Smith also notes: Zoltan Barany The
of Romani studies, and aims to locate and investigate forms of coloniality
inflicted upon Roma historically and culturally through a decolonial lens. In this chapter I set out to give an overview of decoloniality as a theoretical framework applicable to Roma, and justify its applicability in revealing the epistemological and ontological violence that have been inflicted on this group since their arrival in the West.
Historically, the origins of Roma have been heavily disputed and
misconstrued. The term Gypsy (with its variants in Spanish and French: Gitano, Gitan) was born of the impression that Roma originated from Egypt. The Central and Eastern European term, Tsigani (and variants), and Northern European Zigeuner (and variants) originate from the Byzantine Greek ἀθίγγανοι (athinganoi) meaning ‘untouchables,’ originally denoting a 9th century Monarchian sect, which later came to be associated with Roma in the Greek, Anatolian and Balkan regions (Hancock 1999). Colloquially, many of these terms are still in use both by Roma and non-‐Roma. However, due to derogatory usage and negative associations with these terms it was largely agreed upon, following the first World Romani Congress held in London 1971, by attendees to use Rom/Roma/Romani, which are now the widely used official terms (Patrin).3
It is today widely acknowledged, through linguistic and genetic tracing, that Roma originate in North Eastern India, with the first exodus taking place some time between 9th and 13th century CE (Hancock 2008; Lee 2009), though even this loose timeframe is seen as tenuous, as some scholars, including Hancock, have suggested that the first exodus could date as far back as 5th, 6th or 7th
3 As noted in a footnote in the introduction: I make use of the term Roma when referring to individuals or groups that can
be associated with this group. When referring to language I use the term Romani. When referring to sources or usage of other terms, such as Gypsy, or cultural motifs, I reflect the original term/motif used when in reference.
century (Sirmarco 2000; Barany 2002; Vekerdi 1988; qtd. in Hancock 2008). Given the geographical dispersal of Roma groups and linguistic variations in the development of the Romani language, it is likely that there were multiple
exoduses from India at different times, resulting in at least three distinct factions: Rom, found mainly in Europe; Dom, found largely in the Middle East and North Africa; and Lom, found mainly in the Caucasus region (Hancock 1999: I).
Since their appearance on the European continent, the earliest documented evidence dated to the late 13th century in Wallachia (Hancock 1999: II), two major occurrences have come to shape the history of Roma. Namely: the enslavement of Roma in Eastern Europe from the 14th century, and the
porajmos4, or attempted genocide as instigated by Nazi Germany during World
War 2. Simultaneous with enslavement was the Western European
transportation of Roma to India, Africa and the Americas as an unpaid labour force. In each of these cases, the plight of Roma has tended to escape official documentation and academic investigation in a similar vein to their omission in postcolonial studies.
Ian Hancock gives an overview of the these developments in his seminal study The Pariah Syndrome (1987), and describes in the introduction the omission of any mention of Roma presence in: texts on the transatlantic slave trade,
American history books, principal sources on Balkan history, European school curriculum, as well as resistance against publications on these topics from
principal academic journals dealing with Eastern European history at the time of
4 Porajmos translates as ”devouring” or ”destruction” in some Romani dialects, and was introduced by Ian Hancock to
writing5. The attempted extermination of Roma during the Holocaust also received minimal attention until several decades after the end of the war. In academia today, some of these absences are being attempted rectified,
particularly in investigations into the treatment of Roma during WW2 and post-‐ war commemoration. Efforts from civil society actors, activists and Roma rights organisations, such as the International Gypsy Committee, have led to
recognition from official bodies such as the UN of the International Romani Union, which received observer status in 1979 and consultant status in 1993 (forcedmigration.org). This recognizes Roma as a European nation without territory and demands for representation of the Roma community at a national and international level.
Universalising Progress
Entangled in the historical developments described above, are the emergence of capitalism, modernity and the idealisation of progress, which collectively spurred European global expansion, domination and subjugation of territories and their inhabitants. A wealth of literature has been produced to address these topics, but as noted, the impact of these developments on Roma has received relatively little attention. In an attempt to bridge this gap, I will demonstrate and argue for the necessity of decolonial theory as a concept to analyse the effect of European universalism as one cause of the continued discriminating and exclusion of Roma.
5 Hancock notes the following journals’ rejection of his proposition to publish an article based on this study: the Slavic and
East European Journal, the East European Quarterly, the Slavonic and East European Review and the Slavic Review: American Quarterly of Soviet and East European Studies (Hancock 1999: Introduction).
“The history of the modern world-‐system has been in large part a history of the expansion of European states and peoples into the rest of the world. […] The usual argument [for justification] is that the expansion has spread something variously called civilisation, economic growth and development and/or progress.” (Wallerstein 1)
Progress has, in the Western world, been associated with watershed moments such as the Enlightenment from the 17th century and the Industrial revolution from the 18th century (Maldonado-‐Torres 98; Wallerstein 55; Bancroft 20). These developments represent milestones in the Western conception of modernity, which, as an historical era tends to be characterised by secularism, rational thought, nation statehood, capitalism, globalisation, innovation and a conscious separation between the old and the new; the traditional and the modern. Another aspect of modernity, inherently embedded in globalisation, is colonialism: the invasion and sublation of other parts of the world by Western nation states starting in the 16th century with the Spanish invasion of South America. The emergence of capitalism through trade and the Atlantic commercial circuit, due to colonialism, is by certain scholars conceived of as the advent of modernity (Wallerstein; Dussel; Quijano), in other words, as the foundation of modern/colonial world. This notion has been taken up by a group of scholars, activists and artists who operate within the theoretical framework of
decoloniality. A fundamental aspect of this framework has been to reveal the inseparability of modernity from colonialism, and how the already existent economic relation of capitalism came to be interlinked with forms of domination and subjugation.
The relevance of acknowledging this inseparability in the case of Roma is made visible when looking at reasons for and consequences of the institution of slavery in the Balkans. In the early Middle Ages Europe had been profiting greatly from its eastern trading routes. With the rise of Islam Muslim invaders progressed west, encroaching on the Byzantine Empire. From the 13th century Tatars6 and Mongolians invaded East and Central Europe, and Moors came to dominate the south. By the time of the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, Europe had become cut off from the East, resulting in maritime expansion in the search for new trading routes to the Indies, and consequent colonisation in the Americas. The dire economic situation in the Balkans due to war and stagnating economy had made the principalities reliant on the increasing subjugation of unpaid labour forces, which materialised in the formal legislation of slavery from the mid 14th century, to which Roma were specifically targeted. Many fled
further into northern and western Europe, where they were often met with equal hostility for being misrecognised as Muslims or as a result of the
widespread and institutionalised ‘Gypsy-‐hatred’7. With the establishment of the plantation economy, both Spain and Portugal attempted to eliminate any Roma presence through deportation to the new colonies. This tactic was later also employed by other colonising nations such as the British and Dutch (Hancock 1999: VII).
6 The term Tatar/Tater/Tatter for Roma, still in archaic use in German, Norwegian and Swedish, originates from the belief
that Roma, because of their darker skin and foreign language, were Tatars forced to flee from Mongolian invaders (Hancock 1999: II).
7 “In 1568, Pop Pius V attempted to drive all Gypsies from the domain of the Roman Catholic Church; similar expulsion
orders were already in effect in individual countries, resulting in an ongoing shuffling back and forth of Gypsy populations between them.” (Hancock 1999: VII)
“While the eastern European states were enslaving and otherwise making use of Gypsies as a source of labour within their own territories, countries in western Europe were attempting to rid their soil of Gypsies altogether.” (Hancock 1999: VI)
The enslavement of Roma in the Balkans continued until the 19th century when, with increasing pressure from western European nations alongside the movement for abolition of slavery in the Americas, Balkan rulers began to question the practice within their own constituencies. By 1864, following a succession of attempts since the 1830s, slavery was abolished in the now united principalities of Romania (Hancock 1999: IV).
The treatment of Roma within Europe as well as their global dispersion is in large part a consequence of European aspirations for dominance and progress. Compared to other ethnic groups, the numbers of Roma subjugated as slaves in the Balkans and deported to the colonies will have been proportionately lower. However, the diversity of forms of violence inflicted on Roma groups throughout Europe and globally are sadly too numerous to describe here. Furthermore, the reasons for transatlantic transportation of Africans differed significantly from Roma: “the former for economic reasons; the latter, for reasons of hate”8 (Hancock 1999: VII). Suffice to say that what was inflicted on Roma since the emergence of the modern era is equatable to that experienced by colonised subjects throughout and beyond the colonial era, and arguably still today. Coming to terms with the impact of such acts requires a framework for probing
8 I am not implying here, that hate was not a reason for the transatlantic transportation of Africans as well. What is meant
here is that Roma were mainly transported by Western European nations for sake of ridding them form European soil, rather than for enslavement.
the mechanisms and functionality inherent in the justification for colonialism. As claimed by Wallerstein (amongst others), this has historically been an argument for civilising missions and progress. Within such a justification he also reveals the more implicit conception of European universalism, and what decolonialists refer to as coloniality.
Decoloniality – a brief introduction.
Walter Mignolo has been instrumental in conveying and highlighting the on-‐ going legacies of colonialism today and for promoting the decolonial project as an option to delink from the imposing Western epistemological and ontological hegemony. In Coloniality: The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011) he discusses the concept of coloniality, initially conceived by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano in 1989-‐90. Whilst colonialism describes the political, economic, social subjugation of colonised subjects under colonial rule, coloniality reflects the perpetual condition as well as rationalisation that allowed for historical global expansion – globalisation -‐ of Western civilization from the Renaissance until today (2). Intrinsic to this project is the understanding that modernity, revered as the epitome of Western achievements, was made possible by its darker, constituent side, coloniality. As the underbelly of modernity, coloniality is instrumentalised through what Quijano has termed the colonial matrix of power. This consists of the control and subjugation of four interrelated domains: economy; authority; gender and sexuality; knowledge and subjectivity (8). This was initially founded on discrimination and domination through a religious rationale with the Spanish and Portuguese domination in the ‘New World’. As other European countries followed suite, i.e. the Netherlands, England, France,
Germany, from the 17th century, the theological underpinnings of the colonial matrix of power came to be gradually replaced by secular philosophy and
sciences (8-‐9). Mignolo names these configurations respectively theo-‐ (religious) and ego-‐ (secular) politics of knowledge, both of whose proponents were largely white, European males, and consequently also established the patriarchal and racial normative foundations of knowledge that have come to determine the world order to date (9). The theo-‐ and ego-‐politics of knowledge that form the basis of the hegemonic frame of Western modernity have been constructed as the singular universal, and consequently conceal their geographical place of origin by projecting themselves outward as the universal source of knowledge. The principles of modernity, and consequently coloniality, dictate that anything operating exterior to it must consequently be colonised and subsumed into its hegemonic world order.
Within the rationale of the colonial matrix of power we can identify the various ways in which this system of domination was utilized to maintain Roma as a perpetual pariah within and beyond Europe. Enslaved in the Balkans, Roma needed to be identified as subjects for exploitation and stripped of their
humanity and subjectivity in order to justify their subjugation.
In On the Coloniality of Being (2007) Nelson Maldonado-‐Torres describes how coloniality became a model of power consisting of domination of subjects based on the idea of race, and a questioning of the humanity of colonised people. Superiority could be assigned based on social classification derived from race in which the degree of humanity assigned to subjects was dependent on skin tone and ethnicity wherein lightness of skin decided the degree of humanity assigned (99). In the Balkans, Roma presence was defined by their physical and cultural
difference from the sedentary population. Generally darker skinned, and without affiliation to the sovereign state, enslavement could be justified through the dehumanisation of Roma as physically and ontologically inferior, which allowed for the naturalisation of slavery. Hancock suggests that such dehumanisation works largely to console the enslavers’ conscience: “Once they [Roma] were made slaves […] it seems that they preferred this state” (Lecca 1908: 181, cited in Hancock 1999: III). Another observer described them as debased, inferior to animals and “if they had had any redeeming qualities at all, Gypsies would not have been slaves” (Potra 1935: 296, cited in Hancock 1999: III).
The colonial matrix of power is one determined largely by the universalising of the white, male, European subjectivity. Thus the coloniality of gender and sexuality entails a feminisation of both male and female colonised subjects. Maldonado-‐Torres explains this concept as a process where the non-‐ethics by which one operates during war is extended as a normalised exceptionality in the treatment of colonised subjects, where war is not a reality (101). It can be
described as a translation of the enslavement of vanquished subjects due to war to the casting of colonised subjects’ inferiority and inhumanity which works to naturalise slavery based on ethnicity or as a result of racialisation. How the exceptionality of slavery becomes normalised is reflected in Article I (37) of the Moldavian Civil code from 1833:
“Although slavery goes against the natural law of man, it has nevertheless been practised in this principality since antiquity…” (Hancock 1999: III)
Within this suspension of ethics, the non-‐ethics war, where killing and enslavement is naturalised, rape becomes another method of subjugation -‐ in both a literal and metaphorical sense. The dominant force positions itself as conqueror, which is inherently a male figure, a “phallic ego”, and as such
feminises his victims as a symbolic and physical domination (Maldonado-‐Torres 102). The coloniality of being that is imposed on racialised subjects places their bodies under permanent control and mythologises women as fundamentally erotic and promiscuous and hence predisposed to rape. Men become feminised for the sake of the phallic ego to project his superiority, whilst simultaneously being always at risk of suspicion of rape. “Both ‘raping’ and ‘being raped’ are attached to Blackness as if they were part of the essence of Black folk, which is seen as a dispensable population” (109).
The sexual subjugation of female Roma slaves was prevalent in the Balkans; there were also cases of intermarriage. Because of this, the mythologised blonde-‐ haired Gypsy was and is very much a reality, and an outcome of interbreeding with white Europeans. The cultural stereotype of the erotic Gypsy seductress, eternalised in the Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845), is another manifestation of coloniality of racialised subjects and the process in which the coloniality of being and gender becomes normalised as ‘the way things are’ in the development of the modern world. I will elaborate on this notion in Chapter 2. For the feminised male, the perceived threat from Roma men as potential rapists resulted in a category called skopici among house slaves (sclavi domneshti) in Romania. The skopici were castrated as young boys and used to drive the coaches of aristocratic women without the fear of being sexually assaulted (Hancock 1999: III).
Conclusion
As we have seen, the rationale behind western advancement, modernity and progress manifested itself in the racialization of all non-‐white Europeans, which simultaneously universalised the ontological and epistemological state of the white European male. In this chapter I have demonstrated, through decolonial theory, how the construction of a modern world order founded on civilizing missions that self-‐assigned European powers with the capacity to categorise people based on race, was instrumentalised to rationalise discrimination, slavery and forced transportation of Roma from Europe to the new colonies. Through this I have shown that the process that facilitated colonialism and the impact this had on colonized subjects was replicated and paralleled in the treatment of Roma in different ways throughout Europe. Thus, by addressing these historical developments through a decolonial lens we can interject into the field of Romani Studies what postcolonialism appears to have missed. For Roma these
developments have had physical, historical and cultural ramifications. So far I have focused on the structural and political contexts within which Roma came to be persecuted, leading to a distraught history of discrimination, enslavement, forced assimilation, sterilization and genocide across all of Europe.
In the following chapter I will address the related instances of cultural stereotyping which includes widespread cultural simplification to a point in which the historical reality of Roma has been whitewashed, and reduced to recognizable signifiers that help elevate the Western sense of status and achievement.
Chapter 2.
Carmen – The Gypsy Femme Fatale
In the preceding chapter I looked at the ways in which aspects of Roma history have in many instances been excluded from dominant historiographical accounts. By revealing the impact of coloniality on Roma and its
contemporaneity with similar inflictions in the emerging colonial world, I have opened up the field for discussing the history of Roma representation through a decolonial lens. This chapter shifts the focus from physical to cultural acts of coloniality by addressing the stereotype of the dangerous Gypsy seductress as she has become eternalised in the figure of Carmen. I will attempt to make connections between the basis for or incentives behind ‘Gypsy’ stereotyping and its relation to the above-‐discussed notions of European universalism and the modernity/coloniality paradigm. My guiding question in this analysis will be: In what way does Carmen reveal the coloniality of Roma representation? I
approach this question by looking generally at the popularisation of the ‘Gypsy’ trope in literature, in order to narrow in on Carmen’s primary literary source: Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, Carmen. I then move on to study aspects of a selection of cinematic adaptations in order to investigate the evolution of the Gypsy femme fatale stereotype in its transferral from writing, to opera, and finally to the screen. The underlying purpose of this analysis is to reveal the colonising impulse that drives the narrative of Carmen, which has made her a treasured cultural symbol, and the damaging effect this has on real Roma. This is also how I argue for the relevance of the decolonial discourse within which I situate this discussion.
Nostalgia and literarization
As the previous chapter showed, Roma have, since their arrival in Europe, tended to be perceived and reacted to on the basis of socio-‐cultural
differentiation. In the era of European Romanticism, the figure of the Gypsy became a familiar literary and visual trope that served to satisfy a nostalgic desire for the traditional and the exotic. Katie Trumpener’s ‘Time of the Gypsies: A “People without History” in the Narratives of the West’ (1992) looks at what she dubs the “literarisation” of symbolism surrounding Gypsies within the Western, post-‐Enlightenment literary canon (848-‐9). By this she means the progressive dissociation of ‘Gypsiness’ from the principal societal backdrop within Western literary traditions as a feature employed to highlight Western progress and modernity. The effect of this narrative device has been to arrest Gypsy ‘time’ as anachronistic in relation to ‘modern time,’ highlighting ‘Gypsy characteristics’ that emphasise the traditional and pre-‐modern. Trumpener argues that the ‘Time of the Gypsies’ has been denied a place in Western historiography, and furthermore, that the many references made to Gypsies in Western literature are derived, not from impressions of Roma people, but from a “literarised” symbol that has come to represent “the two halves of post-‐
Enlightenment ideology of Gypsy alterity – feared as deviance, idealised as autonomy -‐ played out simultaneously but separately” (854). She describes the insertion of Gypsies as symbols of nostalgia as a mechanism for non-‐Roma or gadje9 to facilely restore a sense of innocence of times gone by, an act which
9 ‘Gadje’ is the Romani term for non-‐Roma. It forms the binary to ’Rom’ meaning ’man’, hence the term ’Roma’ to describe
a varied and diverse constellation of peoples who speak or are believed to have spoken Romani and/or belong to the same ethnicity.
effectively has little to do with actual Roma, in fact facilitating the erasure of their historical reality.
The literarisation of Gypsies in literature reflects in a broader sense the modern/colonial impulse to relegate ‘other’ modes of life to the archaic and pre-‐ modern realm. This hierarchisation signals the construction of a dichotomy between the European modern and ‘other’s’ supposedly pre-‐modern state. This dichotomy informs the sensibility that allowed for the rationalisation of the logic of coloniality, and as such is an essential part of the project of modernity at large.
Constructing the Gypsy trope as a symbol of the pre-‐modern is in this way a colonising act that informs a perception of Roma people as primitive and backward. Moreover, it facilitates an argument about the necessity of forced acculturation of Roma, as was attempted in Germany between 1820-‐40, to name one example, by setting up “colonies […] to allow them the opportunity to give up their itinerant way of life and settle down” (Lucassen 33). The failure to transform Roma into “decent citizens” in the German perception was seen as evidence for the incorrigibility of the “Gypsy race”, doomed to permanence in their pre-‐modern state (Lucassen 37). The text that inspired the German “Gypsy colonies” was Heinrich Grellmann’s study Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner (1783), which was translated to several languages and widely read across Europe. Grellmann was one of the first scholars to argue that Roma originated from India based on linguistic comparison between Hindi and Romani (Carter 44).
Elisabeth Lee Carter argues that the renewed interest in Gypsies in the post-‐ Enlightenment literary canon derives largely from this source, and its revelation of the origins of Roma. Focusing on Romantic literature, Carter reveals how four
prominent writers; Walter Scott, Prosper Mérimée, Victor Hugo and George Sand10, employed the figure of the Gypsy as a nostalgic metaphor for lamenting France’s rupture with its past in the wake of the French Revolution and France’s loss in the Napoleonic wars. They serve to antagonise Romanticism’s nostalgia for France’s severed past by their presented indifference to their origins11 and
history, and inherent transient way of life. At the same time they are also
symbols of the past, with their traditional clothing and customs, which contrasts and highlights the political and industrial transformations taking place in the form of Republicanism and the industrial revolution of the era -‐ otherwise oft cited as bastions of modernity.
This is the context in which the literarised Gypsy was moulded into the Gypsy femme fatale, which has since become a treasured and much recycled trope in cultural articulations of all kinds: literature, poetry, visual art, dance, theatre, opera, cinema. Carmen first makes her appearance in Prosper Mérimée’s novella published in 1845, but her popularisation is largely linked to Georges Bizet’s opera, first performed in 1875.
The plot centres around Carmen, an alluring Roma woman, “Gitanella,” who charms and seduces Don José Lizzarrabengoa, a Basque from Navarre who had fled to Seville and joined a unit of soldiers, serving as police. Carmen works in the local cigar factory, and is arrested by Don José after having attacked a fellow worker in the factory, who lets her escape on their way to prison as she tricks him into believing she is a fellow Basque. In his growing obsession with Carmen, Don José abuses his position to let Carmen and her fellow smugglers pass
10 Carter looks at: Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823), Victor Hugo’s Notre-‐Dame de Paris (1831), Prosper Mérimée’s
Carmen (1845), George Sand’s La Filleule (1853) and Les Beaux Misseurs de Bois-‐Doré (1858), in her doctoral thesis: Taming the Gypsy: How French Romantics Recaptured a Past (2014).
11 By the time Roma had made their way to Europe, any concrete knowledge of their origins had been lost, hence the
through the city. In a fit of jealousy he kills a lieutenant when he discovers Carmen with him and flees his post to join her band of outlaws. He learns that she is married and kills her husband when he joins the band. Carmen’s love for Don José wanes, but in his adoration he begs her to flee with him and start a new life, which she refuses for she is in love with the bullfighter, Lucas. Finally Don José kills Carmen and turns himself in to the police. This forms the basic plotline for the novella and the opera, as well as most adaptations. However, certain features distinguish the novella and the opera.
In Mérimeé’s Carmen, the story is told from the point of view of the unnamed French archaeologist who, travelling through Andalucía, encounters Don José as an outlaw following his murder of the lieutenant. As noted by Colmeiro, the archaeologist and narrator is a semi-‐autobiographical reference to Mérimée himself, who was a cataloguer of national monuments (134). He then meets Carmen in Cordoba. One month later he hears of Don José’s arrest for the murder of Carmen and seeks him out to hear his story; this forms part III of the novella as outlined above. The account we get of Carmen is focalised through a double male gaze: the narrator’s encounter, and Don José’s account delivered to and re-‐ enacted by the narrator. The final chapter, added to the story two years after its initial publication, consists of a series of semi-‐scholarly and highly derogatory remarks about Roma in general, drawn largely from George Borrow’s highly romanticised Zincali: or an Account of Gypsies of Spain (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843), whom Mérimée both alludes to and ridicules in this section, but whose work has been shown to have influenced Mérimée’s story greatly
(Northup 15). The function of the scholarly background of the narrator and the allusion to the author’s similar authority, serves the function of legitimising his
observations. As such the derogatory rhetoric through which Carmen’s persona and Roma in general are articulated is projected as objective traits, which the reader should take as fact. In Bizet’s opera the narrator is completely removed from the storyline and the final chapter goes unaddressed. Instead, he inserts a new character, Michaëla: a chaste and righteous woman, also Basque, who is constructed as Carmen’s opposite. Lucas, the bullfighter whom Carmen wishes to leave Don José for, is renamed Escamillo.
Given its popularity and numerous adaptations, the figure of Carmen has received a great deal of scholarly attention. José F. Colmeiro indicates two opposing tendencies in contemporary critical readings of Carmen: a feminist approach, which sees her as a liberated and independent woman, and a
postcolonial approach which emphasises the misogynistic and racist portrayal of the subaltern (128).
“In fact, the key to its continual renewal and adaptability might be its fundamental ambivalence about issues crucial in the construction of our modern consciousness, an ambivalence which reveals cultural anxieties about gender, race, class, nation, language, and sexuality.” (Colmeiro 128)
As the proceeding analysis will show, I agree with Colmeiro in this regard, and take this statement as a starting point for investigating the function and
development of Gypsy signifiers and characteristics within cinematic adaptations, in order to read these tropes in relation to the
modernity/coloniality paradigm. This analysis will be informed by María Lugones’ decolonial feminism in an attempt to formulate a critical reading of
