Appendix. Race Vs. Ethnicity: the Case of the Gypsies
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Appendix. Race vs. Ethnicity: The Case of the Gypsies The Gypsies provide a good example of the complex and changing nature of categorization and nomenclature, along with the opportunity to revisit the ideas of Max Silverman about the Jew (discussed in the previous chapter) and to apply those ideas to the Gypsy. Over the centuries, the legal status of the Gypsy in England has evolved from alien immigrant to vagrant and beggar to (in 1988) a specific ethnic group protected under race relations legislation. This change in definition has not diminished the confusion about who or what is a ‘Gypsy’, as reflected by contradictory legislative acts in England. David Mayall summarizes some of the major difficulties in capturing ‘Gypsy identity’: Encyclopaedias and reference texts vary in their definitions and change over time, academics and Gypsiologists fail to agree over the basis of Gypsy identity, the state until recently found it acceptable to have two contrasting statutory definitions of the group, internal inconsistencies exist within one source and the works of particular authors, and race and ethnicity as clas- sificatory systems are repeatedly conflated despite fundamental differences in their meanings. Although ethnicity has become the term du jour, there are problems with it. Citing scholar Siân Jones, Mayall observes that ‘the expansion of the category [of ethnicity] to include, among others, groups formerly seen as “nations”, “tribes”, “minorities”, “cultures”, “racial groups” and “religious groups” raises serious questions about the utility of the concept itself.’ He noted at the time of publica- tion of his book in 2004 that the British state continued to define Gypsies as both an ethnic group and a nomadic group, a confusing situation given that these are very different definitions with different potential and actual consequences. Such consequences may be seen in an important difference between the persecu- tion of Jews and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: the case against the Jew was made on racial grounds, while that against the Gypsy was made on grounds of their purported anti- social, criminal behavior. Repercussions of this distinction have included post- war denial of reparations to Gypsies and exclusion from recogni- tion by the US Holocaust Memorial Council. The campaign to establish the ethnic identity of Gypsies thus has a significant political component.1 Brian A. Belton, a scholar with Gypsy ancestry, argues in Questioning Gypsy Identity that differentiations between the terms ethnicity and race are mean- ingless. He remarks how ‘in practice the ideas of race and ethnicity have melded in popular contemporary discourse. There is no difference between the practices of ethnic cleansing and racial extermination, for example.’2 More, Belton argues that treating Gypsies as an ‘ethnic collectivity’ in a campaign to win rights for an oppressed people rests on a shaky ground of supposed com- monalities; he questions the whole idea of ‘an essentialist and homogeneous 205 206 Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence Gypsy population’ that is ‘the Gypsy ethnic narrative’. As well, an ethnic classification that exerts influence in sympathetic societies can all too readily create hostility in unsympathetic environments.3 A case to demonstrate Belton’s point occurred in September 2010, when the European Union took legal action against France for expelling a thousand illegal Gypsy immigrants and demol- ishing hundreds of Gypsy camps in that nation. The United Nations and the Vatican joined the EU in accusing France of targeting an entire ethnic minority rather than dealing with individuals on a case- by- case basis. In a section of his book entitled ‘Marketing Gypsies’, Belton discusses the motivations for, and results of, the vogue in promoting Gypsies as an ethnic community; his words are reminiscent of the discussions of the marketability of Indian culture in works by Leah Dilworth and Molly Mullin, among others. Deploring the current ‘fashion for Gypsies’, Belton observes: The Gypsies, like many other minorities, are highly marketable these days. This threat to turn their culture into a spectacle is a danger more difficult to apprehend than the effects of various regulations or of social work and schooling. There is now a risk that lack of respect will give way to pseudo- respect. In some ways this is worse because it is garbled in an insincerity and fraternalism that are more dangerous than the paternalism that preceded it.4 Four years after Belton’s book, a New York Times article showed the continuing relevance of Belton’s point about the marketing of Gypsies. The article, about the Ensemble Caprice’s concert entitled ‘Bach and the Bohemian Gypsies’, explores how Gypsy music has influenced several composers, and how these composers have in effect taken credit for it. After noting that ‘Gypsy music sells’, the article concludes on a somber note: Yet one may feel a slight discomfort about the [ensemble’s] marketing strategies. For those who study contemporary events there is evidence aplenty that Gypsies are in terrible straits in parts of Europe, and some have raised fears of a holocaust. [The ensemble] ought to think carefully about what it means to represent Gypsies as romantic and carefree, as ‘the Bohemian Gypsies’, at a moment when their situation is precarious.5 How easily the romantic view of the Gypsy can transform into hostility is illus- trated by an event of summer 2009, when thousands at a Madonna concert in Romania booed and jeered when the star spoke out from the stage about discrim- ination against Gypsies in Eastern Europe. They did not want to hear about the plight of the Gypsies, though moments earlier these outraged audience members had been thoroughly enjoying the Gypsy musicians who shared the stage with Madonna and performed the cultural heritage of the region.6 Much remains to be learned about Gypsies, and Wim Willems suggests an historical rather than an ethnographic approach; he asserts that ‘by choosing a socio- economic perspective to analyse the history of these groups, perhaps we will succeed in discovering creatures of flesh and blood behind the social Race vs. Ethnicity: The Case of the Gypsies 207 construction of a separate Gypsy people’.7 Deborah Nord takes a different position. Rehearsing the various scholarly approaches to ‘the question of terminology’ – including those of Mayall and Willems – she concludes that ‘their efforts at reconstruction are problematic for those who wish to claim a Gypsy identity that has a recognizable linguistic, cultural, and ethnic core’. She believes that ‘Gypsy identity is a matter of both personal self- definition and history. Misplaced and racist beliefs in the homogeneity of minority groups do not invalidate the power or felt reality of minority identity.’8 Gypsy populations in modern times have in fact been working to assert their right to characterize themselves, to negotiate the borderline between self and other in ways acceptable to them as a people; they exert this authority and autonomy in defiance of the scholars, aficionados, or haters of the previ- ous centuries and ours, who interpret and impose such definition from the outside. The first Romani Congress was held in 1934, and after the Second World War, stimulated in part by the American civil rights movement, Gypsy solidarity became stronger and more organized. The second congress affirmed India as the mother country and formed an international union; the union was eventually accorded consultative status by the United Nations. The third congress, in 1981, saw the creation of a flag and anthem, and the considera- tion of a separate Romani nation. The fourth, in 1990, appointed a commission to plan a Romani- language encyclopedia. Subsequent congresses, in spite of some internal divisions, have continued the furthering of a Gypsy identity.9 In other developments, a Romany Archives and Documentation Center was founded in London in 1962 (now located at the University of Texas at Austin) and the Gypsy Council in 1966.10 These efforts do not gainsay the fact that, whether described as ‘racial’ or ‘eth- nic’ or by some other term, identity is a complex interweaving of ‘us’ and ‘them’. As David Mayall writes, ‘Identity is felt and experienced, but it is also given and constructed. It is formed and moulded by the group, but this is often set within the parameters provided by outsiders. Identities are also dependent on notions of a core or essence, often fixed and static, but which is also able to accommodate reformulation and change.’11 One’s identity, not to mention one’s ‘true identity’, is the most human of attributes and perhaps the most elusive to pin down. But to engage in such reflection on self and nation, as insiders or outsiders, is to help discover the ‘creatures of flesh and blood’, in Willems’s words, ‘behind the social construction’ – and often trapped underneath the historical accretion of reifying stereotypes. Notes 1 Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other 1. Bertrand Russell, ‘D. H. Lawrence’, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), pp. 112, 114. 2. Wayne Booth speaks of Lawrence’s ‘overlapping narrative voices’ in ‘Confessions of a Lukewarm Lawrentian’, in Michael Squires and Keith Cushman, eds., The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 21; M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Dialogical Principle: “The Strange Reality of Otherness”’, College English 63 (March 2001), refer to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism; see too the special issue on Lawrence and the Other of D. H. Lawrence Studies (Korea), 1.2 (2007). Neil Roberts’s D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) focuses on the impor- tance of travel for Lawrence’s developing vision. 3. Statistics for 2001 are from Datasets and reference tables, ‘Table KS07 Religion’, Office of National Statistics.