Romani Mobile Subjectivities and the State: Intersectionality, Genres, and Human Rights

Abstract

This dissertation examines the discursive entanglements of intersectionality, genres, and human rights, articulated with respect to migratory flows of Romani peoples and livelihoods. As such, it evinces site-specific Romani contestations in Europe, to the Schengen Agreement, to nation-state constructions of subject coherence and membership, as well as to the logic of euro area neoliberalism. The contextual terrain within which Romani communities encounter discrimination by some EU leaders and citizens, exacts a spatiotemporal mapping of human rights violations, exceeding institutional, regulatory state-centric formations. Typically, current work regarding Romani human rights, focuses on static, representational indices such as gender or race, within the Romani diaspora, Porajmos - the Romani Holocaust, and cultural survival. Instead, this critical inquiry invokes two alternating registers of analysis within the context of situated Romani aesthetico-political interventions - as encounters with majoritarian and state-policy events. The first register of analytical intervention, presents Romani film, art, music, photography, fiction, poetry, ethnography, and ancestral narrative - genres contravening normative, neocolonial, and juridico-political precepts of subject fixity. The second register juxtaposes Romani articulations as historiography, archive, and field notes in Germany, to investigate how Romani intersectionality engages the UN, EU, and NGO human rights discourse and policy implementation.