Title: The making of the racialised nation: nationalism and historical commonsense in post-1989 Romania
Part of this research has been published here.
In this dissertation, I aimed to capture the source of wide-spread anti-Roma racism in Romania: white supremacy. I zoomed in on what I demonstrated to be a key form of white supremacy, Romanian nationalism. Whilst Romanian nationalism is often conceptualised in identitarian terms, especially as related to its aversion to ‘otherness’ and its mythological character, in this dissertation I was interested in Romanian nationalism as a material force. Particularly, I analysed the relationship between ‘race’, nationalism, and the way the past lives on in history education, to understand why and how Romanian nationalism contributes to the perpetuation of a racialised social structure through ideological means. This is why I asked the following questions: 1) Why, how, and with what effects, did Romanian nationalism develop as a racial ideology and later transform into the racial project of nation-building? 2) In what ways does the construction of a ‘national past’ contribute to the making of Romanian nationalism as a racial ideology? 3) In what ways does history education co-constitute (anti-Roma) racism and Romanian nationalism? I combined a historicised analysis of the emergence of Romanian nationalism in the context of inter-imperiality with insights from racial formation theory (Omi & Winant, 2014), and the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. I argued that, having emerged through westernisation, Romanian nationalism is a racial ideology which produces ‘Romanianness’ as the racial essence of the Romanian nation, making the identity of ‘Romanian’ a positively racialised social position within the nationstate framework. Conversely, drawing upon broader discourses and structures of Eurowhiteness, Orientalism and antiblackness, Romanian nationalism is a source of negative racialisation that normalises supremacy and racism, chiefly anti-Roma racism. Moreover, I argued that this discursive racialisation – the making of racial meanings – is institutionalised in the framework of the nation-state, so that being Romanian entitles one to resources, rights, representation and recognition. This is what I termed racial project of nation-building. I further claimed that Romanian nationalism developed in this racialised way because of the context of inter-imperiality and westernisation, which led to Romanian elites defining themselves through claims to Europeanness and civility, thus creating the nation as a positively racialised elite-led hegemonic bloc.
To concretise this theoretical and historical analysis, I analysed educational materials about the past that were produced after 1989 – maps created for children and youth and sold on the private market, and state-mandated history education curriculum documents, as well as relevant inter-textual references to these maps and curriculum documents. I was interested in history education as it appears in state-organised schooling because of its potential to create a historical commonsense, a widespread understanding of the past, which can legitimise and normalise the hegemony of the nation. By devising the concept of ‘ideological chains’ to describe how composite ideologies such as nationalism penetrate commonsense and turn seemingly ‘non-racial’ claims into racial meanings, I found that a nationalist construction of the past is key to racialisation processes: it constructs ‘Romanianness’ as a biological and/or cultural racial essence, separate from and superior to any ‘others’. Moreover, historical commonsense continues to be composed of both absences and presences, as the histories and agency of ethnic minorities, as well as the violence perpetuated against ethnic minorities, continue to be erased or sidelined. Informed by tracing ideological chains in educational materials from after 1989, I ultimately demonstrated that rewesternisation, the reintegration of Romania into the capitalist modern/colonial matrix of power after 1989, is but one phase of a two-centuries old racial hegemony legitimised by nationalism and facilitated by the nation-state.
Title: State experiments and the temporalized figure of 'the Roma' in the Romanian landscape: the (necro)politics of knowledge production and Roma representations between 1919 and 1945
In this dissertation, I address the construction of the essentialised figure of ‘the Roma’ through state and academic representations and knowledge-production between 1919 and 1945 in Romania. These representations played a part in the Romani Holocaust in Romania. Through a transdisciplinary genealogy which challenges normative historiography, I seek to answer the following questions: (1) In the context of the political destabilization of the Romanian state (i.e. a state-crisis), what function do representations of ‘the Roma’ fulfil?; (2) How do macro histories of Empire and Romania’s geopolitical position shape representations of Romani people?; (3) How does a ‘state of exception’ governing paradigm reflect the Romanian state’s relationship to Roma citizens in and through representations?, and ultimately (4) What role did representations play in legitimizing the marking of Roma as ‘other’ in interwar Romania, and, ultimately, in removing the Romani ‘other’ from the Romanian state? To answer these questions, I analysed representations of Roma in state documents and academic writing produced between 1919 and 1945. I also analysed testimonies of survivors, who were children or youth at the time of deportation. I argue that the genocide was based on, and legitimised through, discourses and representations that constructed a Romani ‘threat’, creating the ‘necessity’ to trigger a state of exception that led to the deportation of Romani communities to Transnistria, where they were left to die. I employed a variety of theoretical perspectives, including Mbembe’s (2019) necropolitics, decolonial theory and Foucauldian notions of power and knowledge. This case of (necro)political representations and knowledge illustrates how the coloniality of power has shaped the figure of ‘the Roma’, and how significantly it can impact people’s lives. This dissertations contributes to discussions around the role of knowledge production economies in the making of atrocities, and the power of a state to educate a polity
about hierarchies of legitimacy.
This research has been published here.
In this article I explore the responses of Romani students in a segregated school in Romania to majoritarian deficit narratives constructed about them, investigating the specific nature of such deficit discourses and the specific strategies of resistance deployed by the students. To do so, I designed a theoretical framework which fused elements of Foucauldian and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The case study was underpinned by principles of in-depth critical qualitative research, explicitly addressing the racial, political and systemic nature of educational inequalities in Romania. I spent two weeks in a segregated secondary school, in which Romani students were tracked into Romani-only class groups. I observed 12 lessons and interviewed three white Romanian teachers and 11 Romani students. The findings suggested that teachers mobilized deficit discourses about Romani families, culture, cognitive abilities, and potential, reflected in their pedagogical strategies and justifications of Romani students’ ‘school failure’. Students resisted such assumptions through counterstorytelling, naming oppression, class disruption, and refusal of the ‘rules of schooling’, such as homework. I argue that this resistance highlights Romani students’ critical thinking and agency. Among others, the findings indicate the need for urgent change in Romanian teacher training and educational policy.
Dragos, S. (2022). Romani Students’ Responses to Antigypsyist Schooling in a Segregated School in Romania. Critical Romani Studies, 4(2), 122-140. https://doi.org/10.29098/crs.v4i2.95