By focusing on the historical region where Romani enslavement endured for over 500 years, Moldavia in today’s Romania and the independent republic of Moldova, or “interimperial Moldavias,” Manuela Boatcă's talk aims to contribute to relational histories of race regionally (by linking the racialization of Roma and Jewish populations) and on a global scale (by folding East European histories of race into de/colonial histories). It analyzes the reception and impact of the Romanian translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) upon the emancipation movement in 19th-century Moldavia and local abolitionist depictions of Roma enslavement such as Vasile Urechia’s unfinished novel Coliba Măriucăi (Măriuca’s Cabin). In his preface to the Romanian-language translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mihail Kogălniceanu, a Romanian leader of the 19th-century emancipation movement, placed the enslavement of Romani people into a world historical framework and advocated for both the abolition of slavery and of serfdom. Importantly, the translation was made not from an English edition of Stowe’s novel, but from a French translation. It was therefore mediated by the French abolitionist movement and its reverberations across the Francophone world. The project’s goal is to make visible the historical connections these literary and political documents capture and the transatlantic dialogue on enslavement and abolition to which their existence testifies.
Manuela Boatcă is a historical social scientist working at the intersection of the social sciences and cultural and literary studies. Since 2015, she has been a professor of sociology and heads the Global Studies Program at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research focuses on the political economy of global inequalities, gender and citizenship, coloniality, unequal Europes, and the Caribbean. Her book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022), co-authored with Anca Parvulescu, has been published in English, German, and Romanian.
Ayşe Çağlar, IWM Permanent Fellow, will moderate the discussion.
