We're very happy to see published The Historical Presence of the Roma People in European Public Spaces in the 19th and 20th centuries, a Special Issue in European History Quarterly, result of the work of the research team of BESTROM P. de HERA. The articles in OA can be read at: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/EHQ/current Here is a quick summary of the content of the articles. We invite you to read and share them!
After María Sierra's ‘Introduction’ https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221100097 as Guest editor, the volume opens with an article by Eve Rosenhaft, from the University of Liverpool, 'Romani Berlin: Gypsy Presence, the Culture of the Horse Market and the Shaping of Urban Space 1890-1933' https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097599 , which explores the Roma contribution to the construction of Berlin's urban space, focusing on the interactions between Sinti and Roma and non-Romani actors in the horse markets.
The second article, 'Tsyganshchina (цыганщина) and Romani Musicians in Tsarist, Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Change and Continuity' https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097293, by Anna Piotrowska of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, provides a historically oriented sketch of Romani musical traditions deeply rooted in the cultural, political and economic situation in Russia.
For her part, our colleague Tamara West uses visual and textual representations of Romani women and fortune telling to interrogate the shared and contested spaces that emerged during the development of the Blackpool resort in early twentieth-century England: 'Marginality and Modernity on the South Shore: Blackpool's Fortune Tellers, Authenticity and Belonging' https://doi.org/10.1177/026569142210975
In the fourth article, Juan Pro (Instituto de Historia, CSIC) and María Sierra share a reflection on the political-cultural nature of racial/ethnic identities using various case studies to question the relationship between anarchism as a political worldview and the imposed or self-attributed identity label of ‘Gypsy’-Roma: ‘Gypsy Anarchism: Navigating Ethnic and Political Identities’ https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097011
Malte Gasche and Laurence Prempain, from the University of Helsinki, address the presence and social impact of Roma in the public spaces of the circus, focusing on the French Bouglione family, in their article '(Dis)Playing Exotic Otherness in the Circus: The Bouglione Wild West Show' https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097598
Carolina García Sanz, from the University of Seville, illuminates with new sources the study of the British Romani associative movement in the 1960s/70s with her article 'Gypsy Eroding Liberty is Gorgio Eroding Liberty. Making Europe more egalitarian from the British Roma associative movement’ https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097013
... while Begoña Barrera explores the folds of this activism in France, studying the resignification of the exonym 'Tsigane' as a marker of national and ethnic identity in the article 'Nous, les Artistes Tsiganes. Intellectual Networks and Cultural Spaces of Ethnic Affirmation in France (1949-1989)’ https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097012
The Special Issue closes with an innovative work by two researchers invited to participate in this project, Siv B. Lie, from the University of Maryland, and Ioanida Costache, from Stanford University. ‘Staging Genocide: Theatrical Remembering of the Romani Holocaust’ https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221097602 is an article that explores performance-centred efforts to remedy the erasure of Roma from public narratives of the Holocaust.