SNAKLAB Regensburg Southeastern Europe Research Seminars

Assoc. Prof. Nataša Simeunović Bajić (University of Niš, seeFField visiting fellow) will give a talk on…

“Regimes of Representation: Knowing Roma, Constructing Roma“

Time: 4-6 pm

Venue: IOS, R 017, Landshuter Straße 4, 93047 Regensburg

Abstract:

Representation rarely announces itself as construction. It presents itself as knowledge, as something simply seen and recorded, and this is precisely what makes it durable. This lecture follows Roma representation across several registers and centuries: the early modern chronicles and cosmographies where European scholarship first put Roma difference into print, the folkloric and visual imagination that turned that difference into romance or spectacle, and the modern press, where the same figures resurface, now cast as social problems rather than curiosities. What holds these registers together is not a single continuous story but a recurring grammar, one in which each era believes it is finally seeing Roma clearly.The lecture then turns to two national cases, Slovakia and Serbia, and to newspaper coverage in 1989, 1999, and 2009. Set against two very different transitions, one peaceful and one violent, the comparison asks what survives political rupture, and what representation quietly carries forward regardless.

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