‘In England, they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations and the production of Roma difference across Europe

ABSTRACT

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of branding while simultaneously exposing them to different categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are re-adjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last decade in British and European contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrating racialisations
• movement
• race regional configurations
• symbolic violence
• Roma

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the families who have hosted me during my fieldwork, and to the many people who have allow me to enter their everyday journeys and to share their stories over the last decade. I am grateful to Can Yildiz, Nicholas de Genova, Rachel Humphris, Beatriz Aragón, Aidan McGarry, Giovanni Picker, Daniela Castellanos, Stef Jansen, Madeleine Reeves and Peter Wade for comments on early drafts of this paper, and to the feedback I received from seminars and workshop participants in Buxton and in Stockholm for their helpful questions and recommendations. I am very grateful to the JEMS editors and to three anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The phrase ‘black Gypsy’ was almost unanimously articulated in Slovak and reflected the power asymmetries underlying it as well as its directionality as something ascribed externally upon the ‘Roma’.

2 Due to the focus of this article I do not address questions of gender or age, which significantly intersect with race, ethnicity and class differentiations.

3 Most of the migrants’ networks came from the relatively large village of Tarkovce and its surroundings, but also included Roma friends and relatives from other east Slovak localities, urban areas of the Czech Republic and several cities in Great Britain. After living in Tarkovce for a year, I followed the Roma migratory pathways to urban areas in the UK (and back) as I accompanied family networks circulating between these locations. The author has changed all names.

4 Despite the continuing racialisation and patronising practices embraced by many white Czechs and Slovaks towards the ‘Vietnamese’ today, their second and third generations are paradoxically often held up as an example (in contrast to the ‘Gypsies’) of a group that is seen to be hard-working, docile and ‘less’ problematic.

5 Similarly, Fanon’s seminal work characterises these processes as ‘internalised racism’ (Fanon 1967; cf. Desmond and Emirbayer 2009).

6 Being seen as ‘swarthy’ (počarovná) entailed having darker eyes and hair. For non-Roma Slovaks it was connected to a sexualised fantasy about dangerously seductive and attractive Gypsy women and men with enchanting eyes capable of bewitching your desires. The word počarovná has been used in eastern Slovakian variants of the Slovak and Romani languages alike.

7 According to Hajská and Poduška (2003), this distinction was strictly deployed as a marker of sub-ethnic distinctions between the Vlach Roma who saw themselves as ‘whiter’ than the ‘black’ Slovak Roma.

8 De Genova (2005, 167–209) describes similar processes of shifting re-racialisation among the Latino workers of Chicago factories and their uses of irony and racialised slurs of laziness within a space of negotiation constituted between ‘Americans’ and ‘Blacks’.

9 It is beyond the scope of this article to dissect the complex mechanisms and workings of this ‘Roma migrants’ industry’ in greater detail.

10 http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/gangs±milk±benefits±system/2667292. Accessed on October 28, 2008.

11 http://aktualne.atlas.sk/falosne-deti-a-otroci-romske-gangy-zneuzivaju-aj-slovakov/zahranicie/europa/. Accessed November 10, 2008.

12 Other channels include ‘travelling activism’ and the Europeanisation of ‘the Roma problem’ in international and national political spheres, as well as activism and social scientific accounts, as discussed by van Baar (2011; 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council; Simon Research Fellowship, University of Manchester; Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Dissertation Fieldwork Grant].