Manuela Boatcă

For over 500 years, Roma were enslaved on the territory of today’s Romania as part of a labor regime with an elaborate infrastructure. In focusing on the historical region where Romani enslavement endured, Moldavia in today’s Romania and the independent republic of Moldova, or “interimperial Moldavias”, this project 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 V.I. Urechia’s unfinished novel, Coliba Măriucăi (Măriuca’s Cabin) in order to situate the historical connections captured in these literary and political documents within a transatlantic dialogue on enslavement and abolition.