Academic literature on the topic 'Romanies – Nazi persecution'

This article explores performance-centred efforts to remediate the erasure of Romanies from public Holocaust narratives. First, the French play Samudaripen uses aesthetic strategies that emphasize themes of violence and rupture in order to evoke the brutality of Romani persecution under Nazi and Vichy regimes. With its performative elisions between Romani experiences in internment camps in France and concentration camps abroad, Samudaripen connects both historically-specific and fictionalized instances of Romani trauma to broader patterns of anti-Romani persecution past and present. Second, the Romanian-Romani language theatre piece Kali Traš (‘Black Fear’) relays the story of the Romani deportations to camps in Romania in the region of Transnistria under the rule of Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu. Kali Traš pushes back against the silencing of the Romani genocide by reinvigorating the counter-history of the Romani Holocaust in both informative and affectively compelling ways. Each play proclaims Romani agency in commemorative contexts through its narrative and aesthetic strategies. This article shows how Romani artists have engaged in public-facing projects that criticize mainstream Holocaust historiographies and anti-Romani racism more broadly, assessing the extent to which such works constitute valuable additions to Romani struggles for recognition and reparations.

Defence date: 3 July 2006
Examining Board: Prof. Neil Walker (Supervisor, European University Institute) ; Prof. Michael Keating (European University Institute) ; Prof. James Tully (University of Victoria) ; Mr. Stephen Tierney (University of Edinburgh)
First made available online on 14 May 2018
This thesis does not, however, take Catholics or English Asians as its focus, but the most disadvantaged and marginalised group in Europe: the Roma. The daily discrimination and violence Roma face in Europe and beyond is well-documented. It is not, however, the subject of consideration here. Rather, it is the claim of the Romani movement that the globally scattered groups of Roma constitute a nonterritorial nation that is the subject of this thesis. I first encountered the claim to nonterritorial nationhood in a document submitted as part of the Romani delegation to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. The incongruence of this claim with the centrality of territory to political organisation and, consequently, to international law was striking. Yet, enquires made with my colleagues and with a wider circle of Romani leaders about the nature of this claim elicited confusing answers. This thesis project began, therefore, with the simple aim of understanding the claim itself: what was being asked for? How was a non-territorial nation to be understood? What was the claim intended to gain for those in whose name it was being made? In addition to questions internal to the nature of this particular claim, the second aim of this research was to take an external perspective. I wanted to understand how such a claim would be received: to whom was the claim being made? What consequences flowed, or could flow, from the status of being a non-territorial nation?

This chapter is devoted to the wartime radio broadcasts and films of Leslie Howard, which include Pimpernel Smith (1940) and 49th Parallel (1941). Howard worked with the Ministry of Information and independently for two political purposes: to help build British popular support for the war and to encourage Americans to join Britain in defeating Nazi conquest and persecution. He became both a critical and popular voice advocating for Britain, its people and Hitler's targeted victims, rebutting negative connotations of propaganda. His personal voice and anecdotes on radio, combinations of satire, thriller and romance in Pimpernel Smith, and epic thriller in 49^th Parallel were designed to forge a mutually sympathetic transatlantic community emanating from his very successful years in America as a Hollywood star.