"The Role of the Romanies. Images and Counter-Images of
“Gypsies”/Romanies in European Cultures Edited by Nicholas Saul and
Susan Tebbutt Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2004 xii + 258 pp.
ISBN 0-85323-679-8 www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk
This volume collects interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars from
Europe, the USA and Australia on Romany culture in past and present.
Their common conviction is that the history of the representations and
self-representations of Romany culture can be understood on a dramatic
analogy – the role – as a series of intercultural negotiations between
a Romany actor and a gadjo (non- Romany) author or audience (and vice
versa). From these negotiations emerge images which are neither
strictly Romany nor strictly gadjo, but unpredictably hybrid. The
essays seek both to reconstruct those images and interrogate the roles
they exemplify. The fourteen chapters are grouped into four thematic
clusters which reflect major issues in contemporary Romany Studies:
Romany Studies and its parameters, constructions of Romany culture,
Orientalism and gender issues in European literatures, and memory,
records and the Romany experience. Authors include: Thomas Acton,
Claudia Breger, Colin Clark, Carmel Finnan, Ian Hancock, Katharine
Hooper, Slawomir Kapralski, Donald Kenrick, Ken Lee, Yaron Matras, Eve
Rosenhaft, Anthony Sampson, Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt.
The Role of the Romanies will be of interest to students, researchers
and general readers in Romany Studies, European Literary and Cultural
History and Media Studies.
Contents
Introduction: Romanies and Roles
Susan Tebbutt and Nicholas Saul
1 Romany Studies and its Parameters
John Sampson and Romani Studies in Liverpool
Anthony Sampson
The Gypsy Collections at Liverpool
Katharine Hooper
Belated Traveling Theory, Contemporaneous Wild Praxis: A Romani
Perspective on the Practical Politics of the Open-end Ken Lee
2 Constructions and Concoctions of Romany Culture
The Role of Language in Mystifying and De-Mystifying Gypsy Identity
Yaron Matras The Origins of Anti-Gypsyism: The Outsiders’ View of
Romanies in Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century Donald Kenrick The
Concocters: Creating Fake Romani Culture Ian Hancock Modernity,
Culture and “Gypsies”: Is There a Meta-scientific Method to Understand
the Representation of “Gypsies”? And do the Dutch really exist? Thomas
Acton
3 Orientalism and Gender Issues in Literature
Half a Gypsy. The Case of Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’s The
Moonstone (1868) Nicholas Saul Understanding the ‘Other’?
Communication, History, and Narration in Margriet de Moor’s Hertog van
Egypte (1996) Claudia Breger >From Survival to Subversion. Strategies
of Self-representation in Selected Works by Mariella Mehr Carmel
Finnan
4 Memory, Records and the Romany Experience
Disproportional Representation: Romanies and European Art
Susan Tebbutt
A Photographer and His ‘Victims’ 1934-1952: Reconstructing a Shared
Experience of the Romani Holocaust Eve Rosenhaft Ritual of Memory in
Constructing the Modern Identity of Eastern European Romanies Slawomir
Kapralski ‘Severity has Often Enraged but Never Subdued a Gipsy’: The
History and Making of European Romani Stereotypes Colin Clark"
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