Roma are frequently characterized as ‘Europe’s largest ethnic minority’ – an undoubtedly
evocative and potentially politically efficacious description, especially within the EU context. It
might be insightful, however, as a thought experiment, to pause and reflect on how this phrase
frames Romani people, which relations and processes it foregrounds and which, in turn, it
hides. For instance, there is no ‘second-largest minority’ in Europe, which places Roma in a
unique and somewhat isolated position. This is also reflected in how Romani Studies have
developed, in what has been described as a ‘splendid isolation’ from other strands of racial and
ethnic studies (Willems 1997). In addition, the formation and the character of Romani people
are Europeanized by this characterization and implicitly separated from extra-European
processes and connections, such as colonization or the secular Romani presence in the Middle
East, the Americas and elsewhere. As a ‘minority’, Romani social place and space are only
posited in relationship to the ‘majority’ and in isolation from other subalternized communities,
such as migrants. Moreover, the fiction of post-racial societies in which the mainstream society
is treated as ‘non-ethnic’ serves as a benchmark for policies and discourses targeted at ‘ethnic’
minorities such as the Roma.
This conference aims to develop an alternative view and explore the social position of the
Romani people, the character of anti-Romani stereotypes and Romani agency as related to
other ethno-racial projects and broader global processes. Building upon the analysis of
relational formations of race (Molina et al. 2019), of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al. 2016),
of ‘thick solidarities’ (Liu and Shange 2018) or of the notion of ‘intimacy’ (Lowe 2015), among
other points of reference, we aim to bring together critical approaches on Romani racial
formations, ethnicity, membership and belonging that go beyond siloed, comparative and
compartmentalizing approaches to ask: How can we reimagine the Romani racial project(s)
when it is related to other racial projects? What transnational and inter-cultural connections
can be traced? What histories of mutual influences between Romani and other ‘ethno-racial’
communities can be uncovered? What solidarities and politics become imaginable when we
sidestep the ‘majority’ that dominates the field politically?