CALL FOR PAPERS: For a special issue of the Anthropology of East Europe Review on Roma and Gadje, scheduled for Fall 2007.
We are seeking papers that consider the ways Romani individuals and communities negotiate, resist and reproduce the places Roma occupy in the social and political contexts of non-Romani spheres, as well as sociological analyses of the lifeworlds and counterpublics of Roma.

As a liberal order consolidates throughout the Eastern European region, Roma everywhere are taken up either as (to borrow a term from Saidiya Hartman) the “imaginative surface” of the woes of postsocialism or as a romanticized remnant of a bygone past. Roma seem to exist in the shadow of culture – timeless, errant and enchantingly Other – while the social worlds they inhabit are circumscribed by their intensifying economic and spatial marginalization and the continued pathologization of their behavior as inadaptable and often criminal. The historical roots of such stereotyping run deep and resonate powerfully in our particular moment: the Zigeuner/Tigani/Cikán/Cigany Other continues to function within discussions of transnational European identities, even as these discourses claim a complete break with the ethnonational identities of the past. Gadje, in turn, are rarely, if ever, explicitly implicated in the public figurations of difference through which Romani and Gadje identities are mutually constituted and that set the terms of much of the scholarly and activist engagement with Romani lives.

We seek contributions that situate their analysis within this specular constitution of otherness in specific historical, political and social milieux. How are individual Roma and Gadje interpolated by the dynamic and shifting boundaries that inform the dialectics of identity? What are the micro-physics of the negotiations along this border, and how do they sustain the production of difference? How are the ambiguities and indeterminacies encountered along these borders stabilized and made commensurate in acts of recognition (or rejection) of otherness? And how does the figuration of Zigeuner/Tigani/Cikán/Cigany difference symbolically secure the emergent political orders in the eastward progression of “Europeanization?”

Contributions might address visual culture, the entanglements of power and visibility, and the spectacularization of Zigeuner/ Tigani/ Cikán/ Cigany difference, or the processes of subjectivization, the implications of the pervasiveness of the Zigeuner/Tigani/Cikán/Cigany Other for the Romani self, its embodiments, its practices of self-knowledge and self-care, or the poetics and aesthetics of Romani resistance and dissimulation and attendant issues of performativity. Interdisciplinary contributions reflecting sustained ethnographic or archival engagement with Romani communities in Eastern Europe are particularly welcome. Yasar Abu Ghosh, Krista Hegburg, and Shannon Woodcock, the guest editors, would especially like to encourage activists, scholars from the region, and junior scholars, including post-fieldwork graduate students, to contribute to this volume. Papers should not exceed 10,000 words and must be submitted by May 15 for consideration for fall publication. A limited number of contributions may be translated; please contact the editors in advance of submission for further information.

Papers and inquiries may be sent to Krista Hegburg at kmh55@columbia.edu

For more information please visit http://www.columbia.edu/~kmh55/cfp.html