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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