Can the Subaltern Remember?: Memories of the Roma Slavery in Film and Theatre from Romania

• In Event: Gender, Trauma, and Memory in Wartime: Perspectives from Romania, Kosovo, and the Soviet Union

Abstract

This paper explores Roma cultural memory by combining subalternity and memory studies and focusing on artistic remediations of slavery by Roma and Romanian artists. While the Roma population forms one of the largest ‘national minorities’ in Romania, its members have long suffered – and they still do today – from economic exploitation, social peripheralization and cultural subalternization. Living as slaves for centuries until the 1850s emancipatory laws, Roma people had been household property for landowners, monasteries or the state; their ‘emancipation’ was incomplete, as former slaves were not compensated for their exploitation, and as a result their ‘freedom’ was unsustainable. The discrimination and social segregation continued into the 20th century and culminating with the Romani Holocaust during WW2. Also, Romani culture, predominantly oral in a largely illiterate population, was only partially coupled with Romanian culture, as it lacked the institutional apparatus of a national culture. Consequently, Roma memory is a subaltern one, relying on intergenerational familial memory to pass on collective traumas and it is represented by the dominant culture. I conduct a parallel analysis of how the memory of Roma slavery is performed and reframed in the work of Roma actress, writer and director Alina Șerban, and Romanian film director Radu Jude. I conclude that while Jude’s perspective, although taking a critical stance, uses and adopts the subalternizing view of the Roma otherness in the majority culture, Șerban’s gives a voice to the subaltern. This raises a critical question on if and how subaltern memory may opose and defeat the dominant one.

Author

• Doris Dumitru Mironescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza U of Iași (Romania)