Title: “The Trans-Atlantic Shipment of Romanies to the Americas: Discursive Silencing, Erasure, and Inhospitableness”

Abstract:

This presentation highlights the crying need and the considerable value of crossing the borders that have been artificially erected between linguistics on the one hand, and history, demography, geography, sociology, ethnography, political science, economics, etc. on the other. Here this multidisciplinary approach is applied to the process of undoing the discursive erasure of marginalized linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and identificational repertoires and the genocidal erasure of entire peoples. Focusing on the hegemonic consensus among linguists, other academics and the general public that there was virtually no Romani presence in the Americas before the mid-nineteenth century and very little thereafter, evidence is presented from multiple disciplines to make it abundantly clear that not only have Romani been present from the very first days of European colonial invasion of the Americas at the dawn of the sixteenth century, they have been present at the appropriate places and the appropriate times under all of the colonial powers to have had a significant influence on shaping the linguistic, cultural and ethnic practices of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere for the following 500 years. In fact, robust Romani populations continue to survive and thrive on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the genocides perpetrated against them again and again, from the reactionary Catholic witch hunts of the Iberian Inquisition, to the pogroms of the ‘revolutionary’ Calvinist Enlightenment in the Netherlands, England and France, to the ‘modern’ gas chambers of Nazi Germany, and now to the rising ‘post-modern’ fascist tide unleashed by the defeat of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe.