The Anti-Roma Europe: Modern ways of disciplining the Roma body in urban spaces/A Europa Anti-Roma: Formas modernas de disciplina do corpo Roma nos espacos urbanos.
| Autor | Fejzula, Sebijan |
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Introduction: Race, Antigypsyism and the Permanent State of Exception (1)
In this article, I am using the metaphor of "the permanent State of exception" to discuss contemporary state politics that dehumanize the Roma. This metaphor allows me to centre the analysis on "the layered interconnectedness of political violence, racialization and the human" (Weheliye, 2014, p. 1) within the domain of modern politics, and, in particular, to describe the construction of Roma as almost humans or non-humans. Thus, Antigypsyism is deployed in the realm of "exception" and the Roma are constructed as a threat to the state. I draw on David T. Goldberg's definition of racial threat to the "'natural' dominance, settled hierarchies and cultural superiority" (2009, p. 29). In other words, racial threat represents a fear of loss of power, dominance, and resources. Accordingly, I argue that the processes of racialisation and dehumanisation of the Roma have become necessary to the maintenance of whiteness and white supremacy.
I engage with Alexander Weheliye's work, Habeas Viscus (2014), which according to Alana's Lentin reading (2017), it is a call to see 'race' and, thus, the concept of the human. I consider that the analysis of Antigypsyism requires a focus on the racialization of Roma as a set of political relations and connections that aim to "discipline humanity into full humans, not quite-humans and nonhumans" (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3). This act of disciplining, though not biological, lays claim on attaching political hierarchies into human flesh, resulting in the classification of the Roma as non-political-beings thus, their bodies pose a permanent threat to the states and the regime of rights. Thus, Antigypsyism sanctions a "changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot" (Ibid., p. 3).
The creation of modern societies--following the Fanonian definition as political spaces for the heteronormative white male subject of rights--demands a contractual relationship (Cf. Alves, 2018) between the states and their citizens. In this regard, then, the imagining of Roma people as not fully humans or as non-humans becomes ontological. In other words, the presence of racialized peoples or, in this case, the disturbing presence of Roma people within the nation becomes a central concern to the State read as a threat to its very existence as such. As Fanon argued:
The two zones [the white and the black worlds] are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity [...]. They both follow the principle of a reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous (Fanon, 2002, p. 39). The sentiment expressed in the above quotation embodies what Jaime Amparo Alves has defined as a relationship of "ontological impossibilities" (2014, p. 12). Such ontological impossibility, marked by the notion of the (non)human is, in fact, an essential requirement to the making of the nation as a white imagined community. Accordingly, for Weheliye, the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault dismiss the relevance of 'race' and racism as categories that have shaped the modern idea of human allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse "to imagine an indivisible biological substance anterior to racialization" (ibid., p. 4). Hence, he defines 'race' not as a biological classification but as set of processes, regimes and political relations that demand or structures that need for "the baring of non-white subjects from the category of the humans as it is performed in the modern west" (ibid., p. 3).
Accordingly, I argue that the common misinterpretation of Antigypsysim as connected to cultural or biological stereotypes prevents us from discussing it as a matter of socio-political organisations and excludes 'race' as a crucial category. In other words, any attempt to discuss Antigypsyism without critically engaging with the racializing classifications and the definition of the human qua whiteness, re-enacts a racializing violence (Cf. Lentin, 2017). In order to fully understand the mechanisms of racialization and containment of Roma people--spatially, politically and in any sense--, I propose to connect the notion of "bare life" with Fanon's understanding of dehumanization. In particular, I propose to connect the dehumanization of Roma with what Fanon described as his experience as a black man:
I did not create a meaning for myself; the meaning was already there, waiting. It is not the wretched nigger, it is not with my nigger's teeth, it is not as the hungry nigger that I fashion a torch to set the world alight; the torch was already there, waiting for this historic chance." (Fanon, 2008, p. 102-103). An understanding of Fanon's quotation requires a historical analysis of 'race' and racism as ontological constructions independent of racialized bodies, lives and materiality. It is not race what creates racism, but racism that create race, or as Ruth Wilson Gilmore poses: [...] what then is racism if not the political exploitation and (re)production of race? (apud Weheliye, 2014, p. 55). One could argue that there is a long distance between the colonial context analysed by Fanon and the current situation of Roma people in Europe. However, a deep look into the dynamics and power relations enforced by whiteness will reveal fundamental shared connections between the Black and the Roma experience, both based on the fact of being constructed as an inferior alterity of the white man/woman. In other words, share the condition of being affected by the logics of the coloniality of power and its impact, exercised through renewed modern mechanisms.
In this sense, the constructed imaginary figure of the Roma (2) can also be read as closely related to what David T. Goldberg has described as the figure of the Muslim--"[...] the quintessential outsider, ordinarily strange in ways, habits, and ability to self-govern, aggressive, emotional, and conniving in contrast with the European's urbanity, rationality, and spirituality" (2006, p. 344 -345). For Goldberg, the constructed imaginary figure of the Muslim is not the Muslim as an individual, nor as Muslim communities rather the idea of the Muslim that represents a threat to death, created by Europe's paranoia and obsession for its own integrity (Ibid., p. 345 - 346). Thus, "He is a traditionalist, pre-modern, in the tradition of racial historicism difficult if not impossible to modernize, at least without ceasing to be 'the Muslim" (Ibid., p. 346). In other words, He, can easily be referred to the Muslim, the Roma, the Black that represents the idea of the Enemy for the modern world. Within this context as Sayyid describes in A Fundamental Fear (2015) the notion of Eurocentrism has arisen not only as a cultural or intellectual perspective, rather, and more worrying for him, the concept represents the condition of possibility engraved in the western colonial projects. Eurocentrism is, thus, an attempt of reinforcing white privileges. (3)
In this article, I theorize the experience of the Roma people as racially marked bodies from the perspective of social and political power relations (Alves, 2014, 2018; Weheliye, 2014) that allow the reproduction of the divide between humans and non-humans and thus, of racialized violence. This article aims to conceptualize and theorize the processes of racialization/dehumanization of Roma, or the construction of the racial Other, through the analysis of the governmental rulings as modern politics that, as argued by Weheliye "[...] are neither exceptional nor comparable, but simply relational" (Weheliye, 2014, p. 37). Thus, Antigypsyism is naturalized and it has not been part of such theorizations because Roma are (un)seen as being in Europe but not from Europe, as the Muslim, so non-Western, an alien 'race'. I argue that it is within the 'permanent State of Exception' that the justifiable and legitimized violence over the Roma body takes place, driven by its construction as racial Otherness/threat. This notion illustrates the creation of exceptional procedures of restriction, necessary control and discipline exercised in a regime of police States.
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Amnesia, a Symptom of the West and the ideology of integration
The lack of attention given to the denial of Roma people's humanity in the European context has led toward the continuous reproduction of Antigypsysim, or as the Roma scholar Ian Hancock argued (2009), the Roma community still confronts today a systematic crisis since the Holocaust, and unlike Anti-Semitism, Antigypsyism has never been questioned. It is not an exaggeration to say that the historical ambition of controlling Roma bodies that defined the relation between Roma and non-Roma during World War II has not disappeared, it just has changed its forms and sophistication. These modern ways of controlling the Roma bodies are only understandable as a new expression of the same spirit that pushed more than half millions of Roma to the gas chamber: The...
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