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Travellers’ tales

In the absence of their own written records, they have been ‘invented’ and misrepresented in Europe ever since their arrival in the Middle Ages, says Klaus-Michael Bogdal

22 July 2023

9:00 AM

22 July 2023

9:00 AM

Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear Klaus-Michael Bogdal, translated by Jefferson Chase

Allen Lane, pp.608, 40

Published in German in 2011, this book was the high point of a 20-year-old tradition of ‘Anti-Gypsyism Studies’, which suggested that all previous histories of Roma by non-Roma represented a self-serving, defensive ideology of oppressors demonising the oppressed. Anti-racist scholars should therefore stand aside from such colonialist impertinence and leave the actual history of Roma to be written one day by Roma themselves.

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