Reclaiming Race Narratives in Romania: Archives, Memory and Reckoning

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Society for Romanian Studies

Brief Description

This panel explores the intersection of race, historical memory, archival practices, and cultural discourse in Eastern Europe, focusing on how marginalized histories are erased, overlooked, or distorted within both state-controlled archives and broader cultural narratives. The papers draw attention to the omission of certain histories in Romanian cultural and historical discourse, particularly pertaining to Roma and African American experiences, and how such gaps in knowledge expose the archive as a contested site of control, exclusion, and also resistance. The papers further explore the impact of Roma slavery on present-day descendants facing perceived inferiority, stigma, and social exclusion. Finally, the papers interrogate the role of fashion and beauty discourse in shaping racial and ethnic identities, revealing exclusionary ideologies of race, gender, and nationalism. Covering an extensive time period, from Roma slavery to the autocratic regimes of the 1930s to the era of socialist surveillance, the panel examines how gaps in historical knowledge perpetuate structural inequalities and transgenerational impacts in the present day.

The panellists approach these topics from a wide array of perspectives in an interdisciplinary, comparative approach: they draw from the fields of cultural history, performance studies, fashion history, gender studies, and psychology contributing new perspectives to the growing body of scholarship on race, memory, and historiography in Eastern Europe. The panel showcases the complexity of identity narratives in and around Romania, engaging in in-depth discussion about new methods for studying and reclaiming race and ethnic narratives in the region, through a focus on memory and accountability.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Grant Thomas Harward, U.S. Army Center for Military History

Papers

• Destabilizing the Archive: Racialized Silences and Historical Memory in Romania - Stefania Cotei, UC Santa Cruz

• From Chat Noir to Snow White: Ethnicity, Race and Women in Romanian Fashion and Beauty Discourse, 1933-1944 - Sonia Doris Andras, University of Pisa

• Hidden Figures: African American Performers in Romania, 1920-1960 - Alexandra Chiriac, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (Germany)

• Inferiority and Invisibility: The Psychological and Transgenerational Impacts of Roma Slavery on Descendents - Cristiana Grigore

Discussant

• Manuela Boatca, U of Freiburg (Germany)

Session Manager

• Katherina Boicheva Kokinova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Bulgaria)