This chapter starts by offering a theoretical account of a number of ways of understanding identity. This serves as a springboard to discussing identity, based primarily on insights from the work of Stuart Hall as a leading theorist of culture, ‘race’ and ethnicity in British Cultural Studies. I then proceed to apply these conceptualisations to understandings of identity in Romani Studies. Starting with conceptualisations of Romani identity pri-marily along ethnic lines, I go on to explore understandings of Romani identities facilitated by concepts such as hybridity, super-diversity, inter-sectionality and concepts emanating from queer theory and queer of colour critique. That is why there is an oscillation between the singular ‘Romani identity’ and the plural ‘Romani identities’ throughout this chapter and the book. These concepts cross-cut identity categories such as ethnicity/‘race’, sex/gender,1 sexuality, gender identity, class, age, social status, religion and so on, thus facilitating alternative understandings of Romani identities.
Importantly, queer theoretical concepts – and queer assemblages in parti-cular – make it possible to attend to the multifaceted fluidity of Romani identities, including queer Romani identities, due to being non-normative, anti-essentialist and applicable to conceptualisations of ethnic/‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, as well as capable of disrupting dominant homogenising, binary and fixed accounts of identities. Having examined the advantages and pitfalls of intersectionality and queer theoretical concepts, I go on to argue in favour of reading queer assemblages in conjunction with intersectionality, or queer intersectionalities. This enables us to attend to the workings of asymmetrical hegemonic power relations whilst being able to see identities as multifaceted, fluid, always in the process of becoming. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss the methods and methodology used during the qualitative, ethnography-informed research and I provide a methodological reflection on access to participants, data collection and data analysis, as well as on critically examining non-Romani researcher posi-tionality and reflexivity.
DOI: 10.4324/9780367822699-1
Theoretical considerations: Individual and collective social identities
There is no one perfect, all-encompassing recipe for understanding the complexity of people’s identities. Whatever society, population, commu-nity, group or another social unit one comes from, there is no conceptual magic wand that one can wave to understand the ontological what – that is, what exactly we understood about people’s identities – and the epistemo-logical how – that is, how we understand them. This is mainly because identity has always been fraught with much complexity. It has been debated particularly in the social sciences and humanities in relation to a series of fundamental social changes and structural transformations that have af-fected modern and postmodern societies: industrialisation, urbanisation, the division of labour, globalisation, democracy, the (neo)liberal nation state, social movements, the advent of the internet and social media, the global rise of populism and right-wing extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic and many more. In the 1950s, identity was an ‘essentially contested con-cept’ (Gallie 1956) as much as it is in the first decade of the 21st century.
Every era presents our understanding of identity with new challenges. This has been the case, particularly during the past decade when we have wit-nessed a major backlash against ethnic/‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, minority and human rights and equality discourses across the globe. This backlash has seen the strengthening of views, ideologies and movements based on the essentialist notions of biological givenness and the natural.
The following lines will illustrate what exactly I mean by that.
From the earliest moments of our lives, we are taught to make sense of our role in the social world around us as individuals and as members of our respective societies, communities, families and other social and relational units. At the level of individual identity, or self-identity, this may entail what Stuart Hall referred to as ‘the old logics of identity: a notion of our true self, some real self inside there’ (2000, 42). It may seem perfectly natural to us to think that this true, originary ‘real self’ is our essential, biologically given identity that makes us ‘us’. We may believe that we de-velop our identity intuitively while discovering it almost as if it were in store for us somewhere in the future. This conception of identity is reminiscent of the Enlightenment’s ideas about the Cartesian subject being self- determining, self-evident, self-sustaining, coherent, rational and stable. This sense of ourselves, of who we really are, is shaped by our contact with
‘“significant others” who mediate to the subject the values, meanings and symbols – the culture – of the world [they] inhabit’ (Hall 1992, 275). We are almost constantly faced, consciously or unconsciously, with the ques-tions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’. As we get older, we become more aware of our social identities: according to Hall, social identities are aspects of our identities arising from our belonging to distinct cultures formed along ethnic/‘racial’, linguistic, religious, national and other lines.
How we move about in the world as individuals has implications for our individual identity, as well as for the collective social identities that we identify ourselves with. According to Hall (1996a), identity is inseparable from the discursive practice of identification. Identity is a product, albeit evolving – a temporary halt in an ongoing series of constructions (Munnik 2001, 96) – as much as it is part of the ongoing process of identity for-mation or identification; it is constantly reproduced and reconstructed. ‘It is not determined in the sense that it can always be “won” or “lost”, sustained or abandoned’ (Hall 1996a, 2). This notion is contrary to previous Cartesian essentialist understandings of identity as integral, originary and unified. These philosophical views relied upon the Enlightenment’s previous theorising about the Cartesian subject. The inner core, with which the subject was endowed at birth, grew but remained essentially the same.
Ethnicity/‘race’ and ‘new ethnicities’
Roma, as well as LGBTIQ people, were among the millions of people, mainly Jews, murdered and exterminated because the Nazi ideology thought of them as ‘racially’ impure, inferior to the Aryan ‘race’, deviant and anti/asocial. As I discuss in Chapter Two, following the atrocities committed in the name of ‘racial purity’ during WW2, most European states have treated ‘race’ as a taboo, moving towards using ethnicity rather than ‘race’. Yet, in the 21st century, ‘race’ still matters (Lentin 2020). Even though we know scientifically that ‘race’, or for that matter, ethnicity, does not exist – that is, it is not biologically, genetically or physically defined – and despite frequent claims that we live in post-racial times, ‘race’ – similar to class – still functions as a key means of social classification that de-termines and maintains order by putting people into different groups.
Simultaneously, due to the role of the modern nation states in creating the myth of ‘a pure, original people, or “folk”’ (Hall 1996c, 615; original emphasis), ‘imagined communities’ (Ibid, 616) are formed along ethnic/
‘racial’ and national lines. Later in this chapter, as well as in Chapter Two, I discuss the impact on Roma of the ‘racialising’ dynamics of antigypsyism/
Romaphobia, generated by neoliberal nation states in order to create the
‘imagined’ non-Romani majority by marking out Roma as ‘racially’ dis-tinct, different inadaptable, anti/asocial, abject, backward. In this dynamic, national cultures construct identities by producing unified symbols, mean-ings and narratives about the primordial nation, its history, including ori-gins, memories, foundational myths, invented traditions, customs, desire of togetherness and belonging, and continuity of its cultural heritage in the present and the future, with which people can identify. The essentialist logic of ethnic/‘racial’ identity is then conceptualised along similar lines of my-thical unity.
Ethnicity/‘race’ is a discursive category, a unit of meaning. It is con-textual, relational and subject to constant redefinition and reconstruction at
different moments in time, in different regional and cultural contexts.
Ethnicity/‘race’ is constructed historically, culturally, politically, even socio- economically. It is grounded in the discourse of racism (Hall 1996b, 446);
in ‘class [a]s the modality in which race is lived’ (Hall [1978] 1996); and in coloniality and colonialism. Hall insisted on using ‘race’ and ethnicity as
‘the whole social formation which is racialized, not as a kind of sub-category’ (Grossberg 2007, 101). He also insisted on the internality of ‘race’
in all social processes and, in turn, on seeing ‘race’ as a lens, through which broader structures can be explored, rather than a thing in and of itself (Lewis 2000; Grossberg 2007). This is how I understand and use the eth-nicity/‘race’ nexus, which I discuss in Chapter Two: ‘“Perverse” and “de-viant” queer sexualities, genders, ethnicities and “racialities”’.
National and ethnic/‘racial’ identities are not something that we are born with; rather, they are sets of cultural values, symbols, meanings and systems of cultural representation we are born into. We know what it means and entails to be a member of a specific national group – for example, English, Japanese, Czech or member of an ethnicised/‘racialised’ group, for example, Roma – based on how that meaning and its signifier have come to be re-presented to us, often through what they exclude.2
As part of the process of identification, we are in a constant dialogical relationship with these sets of meanings, negotiating our identities. Hall believed that as collective social identities, ethnicity/‘race’, sex/gender, sexual and gender identities, class and religion stood at the root of orga-nising people’s thinking. They came to represent the most fundamental units, or systems, of the social order through which people made sense of and gave meaning to their individual identities and the social world sur-rounding them. These collective social identities that were part of essential, universal, homogenous, unified ‘already-produced stabilities and totalities’
(Hall 2000, 45) have been fundamentally transformed, giving rise to new types of collective social, or cultural identities. These new identities yield a much greater degree of plurality and fragmentation, offering a glimpse of a politics which is
able to address people through the multiple identities which they have – understanding that those identities do not remain the same, (…) that they cross-cut one another, that they locate us differently at different moments (…) and do not stitch us in place, locate us, in the way they did in the past. (Hall 2000, 59, 63)
Elaborating extensively on a significant shift in conceptualising the term
‘black’ in black cultural politics in the United Kingdom (UK), Hall ushered in a new approach to conceptualising ethnic/‘racial’ identities, or ‘new ethnicities’ as multiple, multifaceted, fluid and intersecting. ‘Black’ did not cease to denote the specific experiences of individuals who identified as black; however, it was necessary to account for other aspects of identity, or
categories of identification, predicated on an assumed difference from ‘so-cial norms’. These locate each post-modern subject differently within dif-ferent social and cultural systems, paradigms and discourses. This new logic of identity grounded in difference and diversity enables each subject to
speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture. (…) We are all, in that sense, ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are (Hall 1996b, 447; original emphasis).
While ethnicity/‘race’ may be one of the aspects of this location within the different social and cultural discourses, gender, sexuality and class must be attended to as well. As we shall see later in this chapter, this new under-standing of identities is in line with intersectional feminism, lesbian and gay studies and queer theory.
Hall argued that the loss of the Cartesian fantasy of a stable ‘sense of self’ in the latter part of the 20th century resulted in ‘de-centering in-dividuals both from their place in the social and cultural world, and from themselves – (…) a “crisis of identity”’ (Hall 1992, 275); and in the emergence of the post-modern subject and the shifting of personal iden-tities. Consequently, the post-modern subject was reconceptualised as fragmented, having ‘no fixed, essential, permanent identity, (…) composed not of a single, but of several sometimes contradictory or unresolved identities’ (Ibid, 276); ‘never singular but multiply constructed across dif-ferent, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and posi-tions’ (1996a, 4). This type of subject is also a sociological one: a modern, interactive conception of identity and the self, formed in relation to people and surrounding cultural systems. This reconceptualisation helped to spell out the contextual side of identities: that is, the discourses, systems and paradigms, within which the post-modern subject operates, and their ef-fects, through which the post-modern subject is constantly determined, shaped and transformed. It also revolutionised the way we understand the content and function of identities. The above shifts in grasping ethnic/‘ra-cial’ identities have been key to conceptualisations of Romani identity – or, indeed, identities – in Romani Studies, discussed in the following section.
Reconciling binary essentialist and constructionist understandings of Romani identity
Roma are a very heterogeneous, transnational ethnic minority grouping of numerous sub-groups. Though citizens of nation states – except for Romani refugees and internally displaced persons – Roma are regarded, and at times regard themselves, as a nation without a state: a notion that was first clearly articulated in the ‘Declaration of a Roma Nation’ (2000) asserting a right to self-determination as a non-territorial nation but making no claims to a
territory (Acton and Klímová 2001). Even though numerous members of these diverse sub-groups speak various versions and dialects of the Romani language (Matras 2002, 2013) and engage in similar cultural practices and customs (Acton and Mundy 1997), Roma are not united by one common language, religion, cultural practice, geographical location, occupation, physical appearance or lifestyle (McGarry 2010; Surdu and Kovats 2015).
Contrary to this complex reality, Roma and Romani identity have been subject to a plethora of misrepresentations and stereotypes. More often than not, Roma have been represented as a homogenous ethnic group along essentialist lines, whose members’ physiognomic features and behavioural traits are deemed genetic, thus allegedly determined before/at birth by virtue of their ethnic/‘racial’ identity. A word of caution is required here since the above objective external circumstances are often referred to as the common properties or attributes of Roma; unfortunately, some academic discourses are not an exception. Historically, stereotyping misrepresentations ex-ternally imposed on Roma, often by non-Roma, have been instrumental in generating and maintaining negative perceptions and single-story notions held by non-Roma about who Roma are. The actual lives of Roma with multiple identities, one of which happens to be Roma, have thus been hi-jacked by distorted narratives and stereotypical images of ‘Gypsiness’, the
‘Gypsy’ and a ‘Gypsy fetish’ (Gay y Blasco 2008, 298). Coupled with his-torical suppression of Romani cultural identity (McGarry 2010), these misrepresentations have come to be intrinsically associated with Romani identity, seen as essential, defining, in-born markers of Roma, and turned into common knowledge, informing the views, beliefs and values of non- Roma, and at times those of Roma through internalised racism. This powerful negative, or pathological, valuation of Romani identity has not only put Roma in ‘double jeopardy’ (Vermeersch 2006) when trying to frame Romani identity in a positive way to mobilise around it in the face of negative narratives relating to Romani ethnicity. This negative valuation has also been fuelling antigypsyism even further, thereby facilitating the process of creating a stigmatised, as well as ‘closeted’ Romani identity, explored more in detail in Chapter Two.
In Romani Studies, scholars have leaned towards two distinctive, divisive, though not mutually exclusive conceptualisations of Romani identity. The essentialist – or primordial – approach, has tended to define Roma as a historic ethnic diaspora and an unassimilated ethnic group that shares a common origin, language, history and culture (Fraser 1992; Lee 1998;
Hancock 2002; Horváthová 2002). A more radical form of this con-ceptualisation, which some authors view as a separate concon-ceptualisation, concentrates on the issue of biological kinship, accentuating the notion of natural tribal bonds and genetic, or phenotypic, characteristics (Hancock 1992, 2002; Lee 1998). Some of these theories have been supported by developments in genetics, with scholars asserting that molecular genetic studies concerning European Roma unequivocally confirm the linguistic
theory of the Indian origin of Roma (Iovita and Schurr 2004; Comas Martínez-Cruz et al. 2015; Font-Porterias et al. 2019). However, biological theories related to Romani identity are problematic (Vermeersch 2006) considering the devastating impact that racist ideologies, particularly the Nazi racial ideology and eugenics, have had on Europe, as well as the United States (US) because of their claim that Roma are biologically ‘defi-cient’ due to having the so-called ‘Romani gene’. At the heart of essenti-alism lies a belief that people have a set of certain innate, enduring characteristics – or essence – because of their biological or genetic make-up.
Complementing biological essentialism, cultural essentialism, which has been referred to as the new racism since the 1980s, is based ‘not on the ideas of innate biological superiority, but on the supposed incompatibility of cultural traditions’ (Donald and Rattansi 1992, 2). Whether biological or cultural, essentialism is problematic because it ignores and plays down the role of history, society and cultural environment. As we have seen so far, Hall’s anti-essentialist theoretical formulation sought to re-conceptualise ethnicity without relying on biological or cultural essentialism.
The social constructionist – or culturalist – conceptualisation has largely focused on issues concerning lifestyle and behaviour. It elaborates on the idea that Roma share a common culture and cultural practices such as elements of religion, habits, purity laws, travelling, a set of beliefs, some-times referred to as Romipen or Romanipen, the Romani identity; and that Roma occupy specific niches, particularly in the changing division of labour (Okely 1983). Lucassen et al. (1998) have argued that Roma are related to one another exclusively by their behaviour as they choose to be self- employed, work with their family and lead an itinerant lifestyle; as a result, Roma are an interest group rather than an ethnic minority with common roots and culture (Lucassen et al. 1998, 171). Other scholars such as Jakoubek and Poduška (2003), Jakoubek (2004) have made similar, albeit highly controversial claims suggesting that the common traits that Roma share are ‘culture of poverty’ and loyalty to kinship: this, in their opinion, does not constitute the principle of ethnicity or nationality. However, the legitimacy and validity of these radical versions of constructionism have been questioned by a number of Czech academics (Barša 2005; Elšík 2004) due to the implications and politically detrimental impact the research has had on Czech Romani communities, particularly at the local and regional level.
Some Romani Studies scholars have positioned themselves within the remit of the diasporic, or primordial, conceptualisation of Romani identity while others have been critical of it. However, the distinction between the two conceptualisations is not always so clear-cut. Some scholars associated with – and at times critiqued for – their essentialising approach have moved between the two approaches. Certain scholars such as Hancock use the term ‘strategic essentialism’, coined by Spivak in 1984 (Chakraborty 2010):
the notion that some socially, politically or otherwise subordinate,
marginalised or discriminated against groups temporarily put aside group differences in order to forge a sense of stable, fixed collective identity,
marginalised or discriminated against groups temporarily put aside group differences in order to forge a sense of stable, fixed collective identity,