Nidhi Trehan - Angela Kóczé Racism, (Neo-)Colonialism and Social Justice - the Struggle for the Soul of the Romani Movement in Post-Socialist Europe

Racism, (neo-)colonialism, and social justice: the struggle for the soul of the Romani movement in post-socialist Europe Nidhi Trehan and Angela Kóczé

For Reference
“Postcolonial racism and social justice: the struggle for the soul of the Romani civil rights movement in the ‘New Europe’ ” by Angela Kocze and Nidhi Trehan, in Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe ed. G. Huggan, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009 , pp.50-77

‘It’s not of air and eternity, evil isn’t; it’s of earth; it’s physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less…’ ‘The real thing about evil,’ said the Witch at the doorway, ‘isn’t any of what you said. You figure out one side of it––the human side, say––and the eternal side goes into the shadow. Or vice versa. It’s like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.’ (G. Maguire, Wicked)

What can the critical-theoretical framework of postcolonial studies offer to the study of contemporary Romani oppression, especially the study of oppression within the ‘movement’ for the equal rights of Romani Europeans? In this chapter, we employ the works of a number of different critics, many of them influenced by postcolonial theories, in order to interrogate the diffuse forces of power and to show how these operate within the ‘Roma rights’ movement as a means of explaining the presence of racialised hierarchies and neo-colonial dynamics. In focusing on the repercussions for legitimacy, representation and autonomy in the movement, empirical data from post-socialist Europe1 is combined with original theoretical insights about ‘whiteness’ and ‘race’ to offer a deeper understanding of the complexities of Romani emancipation in the multiply colonised space of the region.

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