The reigning notion of “Europe” and its corresponding claims to whiteness, civilization, modernity, and development have historically been defined from positions of power mainly associated with colonial and imperial rule. To this day, the label of “Europe” always includes both Western Europe and its white and Christian populations, but Europe’s East and South, and even more its Southeast, typically need to be specifically mentioned in order to be included within the scope of the term. Similarly, for a long time, Black Europe needed to be argued, defended, and explained. As a result, Black European populations were rendered unthinkable, Muslim Europeans made invisible, and slavery in Europe became unmentionable. In particular, the migration of the Roma into Europe, their enslavement in Moldavia and Wallachia for over 500 years, and the consequences of this history of systematic exploitation, genocide, and disenfranchisement of a long-standing European population for an understanding of Europeanness have until recently tended to be left out of most analyses of European racism, slavery, and the Holocaust. Drawing on the notion of “unthinkable history” proposed by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in the context of the Haitian Revolution, the lecture focuses on the theoretical and political implications of questions of Europeanness and specifically asks: What is it that makes Romani Europeans unthinkable in a European project?
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.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar will moderate the discussion.
