On March 18th, the Institute of European Studies hosted Professor Manuela Boatcă of the University of Freiburg to share her presentation, “The Other Enslavement; Notes on Unthinkable Europeans in Unequal Europes.” This event was also sponsored by the German Historical Institute of Washington, the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, the Austrian Studies Program, the Center for Race and Gender, and the UC Berkeley History Department. Fabio Heupel Santos, a Tandem Fellow from the German Historical Institute Washington moderated and 12 people attended the lecture.
Boatcă co-authored Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires and her lecture drew on findings from this book. In her presentation, Boatcă argued that the enslavement of the Roma people has been largely absent in historical analysis, research, and education. She introduced a timeline of the Romani people and their enslavement, including notable events such as when the Roma arrived in Europe and were enslaved in the southeast, when the first anti-Romani laws were passed in Lucerne Switzerland and in Spain, and when the parliaments in Landau and Freiburg declared Roma traitors to the Christian countries, spies for the Turks, and carriers of the plague.
Boatcă showed that the enslavement of Romani people has fallen between temporal and spatial cracks. Boatcă argued that a shift in attention and understanding is important. Boatcă’s lecture also compared and connected the Haitian revolution and compensation for French slavers with Romani enslavement and emancipation and compensation for Eastern European boyars or landlords.
This event ended with a plea for action. Boatcă discussed the continuous racialization and stereotyping of Romani people, and called for more research on the topic, as there are many unresearched documents that are waiting to be explored. She called for a reinterpretation of what it means to be European, and reminded the audience that Romani European history is not unthinkable.