RomMig held its first workshop at the University of Bielefeld on 6-7 March, under the title Transnational Migration in Romani History: Agency, Media, and Policing. In spite of the snowy weather, we were able to carry on our discussions in comfort with the friendly and expert support of Bielefeld’s state-of-the-art Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.
Speakers from the UK and Continental Europe discussed individual cases in Romani history and questions of sources, archives and interpretation from a range of disciplinary perspectives, with a particular focus on Romani experiences of migration and border-crossing. RomMig members Felix Brahm, Mario Franz, Eve Rosenhaft and Tamara West introduced the RomMig project, including aspects of research cooperation between scholars and the Romani community.
Jodie Matthews (Huddersfield) opened the speaker sessions with the question ‘How do disciplinary borders impact figurations of the transnational?’ and with wide-ranging reflections on the potential uses of literary works and visual representations – sometimes read against the grain – as sources. Anglo-Romany scholar and poet Karen Barton offered examples of the ways in which Romani poets have negotiated questions of identity in the face of ‘legacies of bordered imaginations’, increasingly in dialogue with other diasporic and colonised people. Literary texts were also the theme of the presentation by Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Bielefeld) at the close of the workshop, in which he analysed the themes of migration, victimhood and resistance in Matéo Maximoff’s semi-autobiographical novel Verdammt zu Leben (French original: Condamné à survivre, 1984).
Between these literary book-ends, presentations by historians addressed specific moments in Romani migration history, all on the basis of new in-depth research and all with an emphasis on the active agency and family strategies of Romani actors. With a paper on European ports as springboards for Romani mobility (1870-1920), Adèle Sutre (Paris) offered a glimpse into her rich research findings on the transoceanic migrations of Romani families in the ‘age of mass migration’. Simon Constantine (Wolverhampton) discussed the context of the movements of German Sinti and Roma which are at the centre of the RomMig project, detailing the intensified police harassment around 1900 that was a ‘push-factor’ for them; Romani resistance to the forced removal of Romani children from their families is a still under-researched dimension of the package of family strategies that included emigration. The impacts of state harassment and attempts at forced sedentarisation were also Colin Clark’s (Glasgow) theme, in his presentation on Scotland’s long-running ‘Tinker Experiment’ (1917-1989). Verena Meier (Heidelberg) gave an account of the situation of Central German Sinti families in the immediate post-war period, seeking to reunite scattered families under conditions of continuing public and official prejudice, the tightening of the German-German border and the forced expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. Also focusing on the aftermath of the Holocaust, Volha Bartash (Regensburg) discussed her use of memoirs, diaries and visual material (in the absence of archival sources) to study the personal, familial and community dimensions of migration by Polska Roma.
We are looking forward to preparing the workshop papers for open-access publication.
Meanwhile, the next RomMig conference will be held at the German Historical Institute, London, 24-26 April 2024. The title of the conference is Crossings: Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires (c. 1850-1914), and the Call for Papers is here.