ROMANI MOBILE SUBJECTIVITIES AND THE STATE: INTERSECTIONALITY, GENRES, AND HUMAN RIGHTS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE OFFICE OF GRADUATE EDUCATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE July 2018 By Bettina J. Brown Dissertation Committee: Michael J. Shapiro Kathy E. Ferguson Nevzat Soguk Wimal Dissanayake Robert Perkinson Keywords: Romani, intersectionality, genres, human rights, European Union Acknowledgments Diverse, pluralizing Romani articulations guide and inform Romani Mobile Subjectivities and the State: Intersectionality, Genres, and Human Rights. This dissertation presents a mosaic of Romani people, place, time, and movement. I want to note my heartfelt appreciation to all at the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma, in Heidelberg, and to the many who assisted at numerous source sites in Germany and the United Kingdom, during this doctoral work. Thank you, to my advisor, Michael J. Shapiro, scholarship giant, for your kindness and inspiration, support and gentle patience. You gave me the opportunity to make this dissertation possible. I am eternally grateful. Thank you, Kathy E. Ferguson, for your scholarship among earthlings, helping to inform this dissertation and its title, and all your support. I am eternally grateful. Thank you, Nevzat Soguk, for your scholarship on communities displaced by hegemony, graciously serving on my committee, and your insightful support. Thank you, Wimal Dissanayake, for your scholarship on how worlds world, introducing me to Cultural Studies, and your helpful feedback. Thank you, Robert Perkinson, for your scholarship on civil rights, the incarceration industry, and your thoughtful encouragement. Vielen Dank, mentors and friends, faculty, staff, and fellow students (too many to mention) in Political Science, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies, for the generous assistance, and student collegiality. Thank you for the profound privilege to be informed by critically-oriented interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship in the Department of Political Science; animated by a like- minded spirit of affirmative community praxis in a Hawaiian place of learning. i Abstract This dissertation examines the discursive entanglements of intersectionality, genres, and human rights, articulated with respect to migratory flows of Romani peoples and livelihoods. As such, it evinces site-specific Romani contestations in Europe, to the Schengen Agreement, to nation-state constructions of subject coherence and membership, as well as to the logic of euro area neoliberalism. The contextual terrain within which Romani communities encounter discrimination by some EU leaders and citizens, exacts a spatiotemporal mapping of human rights violations, exceeding institutional, regulatory state-centric formations. Typically, current work regarding Romani human rights, focuses on static, representational indices such as gender or race, within the Romani diaspora, Porajmos - the Romani Holocaust, and cultural survival. Instead, this critical inquiry invokes two alternating registers of analysis within the context of situated Romani aesthetico-political interventions - as encounters with majoritarian and state-policy events. The first register of analytical intervention, presents Romani film, art, music, photography, fiction, poetry, ethnography, and ancestral narrative - genres contravening normative, neocolonial, and juridico-political precepts of subject fixity. The second register juxtaposes Romani articulations as historiography, archive, and field notes in Germany, to investigate how Romani intersectionality engages the UN, EU, and NGO human rights discourse and policy implementation. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS: Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………...i Abstract………………………………………………………………..............ii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………....1 Prologue………………………………………………………………………....1 Introduction………………………………………………………………….....4 Framing Inquiry……………………………………………………………......4 ‘Subjects of eligibility’?………………………………………………...........9 Dissertation work…………………………………………………...............21 CHAPTER 2: ROMANI MOBILE SUBJECTIVITIES…………………….......23 Prologue…………………………………………………………………….....23 Introduction…………………………………………………………………...25 Competing Cosmologies…………………………………………..............28 Roma Rising………………………………………………………………......35 ‘Home’………………………………………………..................................38 Gadjo Dilo……………………………………………………………………...48 Nowhere to Go……………………………………………………...............59 Rom Som……………………………………………………………………….64 Concluding Thoughts………………………………………………….........68 iii CHAPTER 3: THE IDENTITY PROBLEMATIC………………………………..71 Prologue…………………………………………………………………….......71 Introduction………………………………………………………………….....73 Korkoro…………………………………………………………………………..74 Taloche and ‘Chouroro’…………………………………………………….....77 In Transit…………………………………………………………………..........80 The Camp Dispositif……………………………………………………………86 Boot Camp………………………………………….....................................90 Romani Rule………………………………………………………………........94 Roasted Chicken………………………………………..............................100 Administration and Justice……………………………………………........113 Community and Sense………………………………………………………..120 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………….......134 CHAPTER 4: HUMAN RIGHTS & ROMANI WOMEN………………….....141 Prologue……………………………………………………………...............141 Introduction…………………………………….......................................142 Papusza………………………………….................................................143 Nomad and ‘Method’…………………………………………………………159 Forced Sterilization……………………………………………………………161 Subject Membership………………………………………………………….170 EU Human Rights and the Neocolonial……………………………..........172 ‘Difference’ and the Former Eastern Bloc……………..........................196 Concluding Thoughts……………………………………….......................201 iv CHAPTER 5: ROMANI COMMUNITY PRACTICES AND THE STATE…...204 Prologue………………………………………………………………............204 Introduction……………………………………………………………………204 Discursive Interventions………………………………………………........206 Constitutional and Ideological Considerations……………………........207 The Global Economic Crisis……………………………………………........215 Berlin Field Notes………………………………………………………….....219 Concluding Thoughts……………………………………………………......222 References…………………………………………………………………......227 v Chapter 1: Introduction - It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Audre Lorde (1979) If only Roma could live in this country as people. --Agnesa Horátová (2005) The reach of imperialism into ‘our heads’ challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity. --Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) Prologue Where are you from? Berlin, Neukölln Train Station: Me: Where are you from? Her: I have to buy my train ticket. M: Okay M: Your baby was crying, so I tried to calm him. Where are you from? H: Romania M: Have you been in Germany long? H: Sometimes M: What do you mean? H: It is my place. M: I don’t understand. H: My mother lives here. Are you from here? You look like a “Turkish.” M: I am from Hawaiʻi, but I was born here. 1 H: You are not German. M: Yes, I am, and my grandmother came here from Portugal. Are you Romani? H: No. I speak Romanian. M: Is Romania your home? H: No. My house is in Kreuzberg. There is my sister… (Berlin field notes May 23, 2011). I felt a sudden clasped compression on my chest pinning me against my upright seatback, my ears pinging in high pitch during an aborted landing at Tegel International Airport. Muscle memory is a fickle sensation; its loyalty unstable. It’s intuitive, silent below the surface, yet reasserts itself in reflex after a boat ride on choppy seas, or a sinking feeling in your knees. I carried this sense in my long walks throughout the city. The surfaces are uneven and disjointed in Berlin on the cobblestone streets of market squares, and the smooth indifferent avenues of the city center. After purchasing more comfortable walking shoes, I realized street surfaces are an intimate relation to location, often ignored by privileged eye-level architecture. The terrain in its texture occupies our movement, not only by our navigated traversal but also by its selective spatiotemporal intrusion. This territorial alliance (in an unconventional use of the term) coexists by impinging forces on the ‘Traveller’, yet as a dynamic neither corroborates the other in space nor time. The street surface affects mobile subjects by occupying their trajectory in the present. Territorial effect as ‘affection’ however, mobilizes subjects beyond the stasis of effect (uate), as the phenomenological interiority to exteriority modes of ‘being-in-the- world’, following Martin Heidegger’s analytic, by its ‘being as becoming’. In my shaky 2 posture in relation to the ground below my feet, I exit the airport terminal. The memory of the Lufthansa ‘encounter’ and ‘event’ with earth and sky had done its work of appropriating spatio-temporal time. I take a deep breath, and the initial mapping of my surrounding is met by a cursory side-glance from a white-shirted uniform official. She turns around, her hands clasped behind her back. The back of her shirt displays the letters Ordnungspolizei. I burst into laughter, back on solid ‘foundation’. The German foundation sweepers are back