Romani Epistemic Resistance beyond White Fragility: Decolonial Refusal in a Workshop on Romani Genocide
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article critically engages with racialized epistemic structures that pretend to “include” Romani voices while simultaneously colonise, extract, and discipline them. Based on my lived experience in 2025 as co-trainer in a workshop on Romani genocide, I delve into the attitude of a “White” historian who perpetrated epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) by controlling the narrative, essentialising and Orientalising Romaniness, silencing Romani epistemologies, ignoring first-hand Romani family histories, and ignoring ongoing systemic biopolitical violence against Roma in Europe. This article has three aims: (1) to show that Romani epistemic sovereignty acts as a refusal to the colonial “neutrality of academia; (2) to show that so-called institutional “inclusion” is, more often than not, containment through Orientalism, neo-colonial forms of knowledge production (Trehan and Kóczé 2011) and White fragility (DiAngelo 2018); and (3) to show that acts of refusal by Romani people constitute decolonial resistance. Therefore, intertwining my lived experience with critical theory, I suggest that Romani knowledge is a theory, a method, and a decolonial intervention in and of itself. This is a call for epistemic justice and, at the same time, an assertion that Romani subalterns have spoken.
Source: Critical Romani Studies
Author: Rufat Demirov
Institution: Central European University
Language: English
Topic: Romani and Gypsy Studies
Subfield: General Health Professions
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4417267883