Victoria Shmidt - Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe)

In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on everyday racism. This book attempts to interpret such a gap as a case of epistemic injustice. It underscores the historical role of ideas in race making and provides analytical lenses for exploring cross-border transfers of whiteness in Central Europe. In the case of Roma, the scientific argument in favor of segregation continues to play an outstanding role due to a long-term focus on the limited educability of Roma. The authors trace the long-term interrelation between racializing Roma and the adaptation by Central European scholars of theories legitimizing segregation against those considered non-white, conceived as unable to become educated or civilized. Along with legitimizing segregation, sterilization and even extermination, theorizing ineducability has laid the groundwork for negating the capacity of Roma as subjects of knowledge. Such negation has hindered practices of identity and quite literally prevented Roma in Central Europe from becoming who they are. This systematic epistemic injustice still echoes in contemporary attempts to historicize Roma in Central Europe. The authors critically investigate contemporary approaches to historicize Roma as reproducing whiteness and inevitably leading to various forms of epistemic injustice. The methodological approach herein conceptualizes critical whiteness as a practice of epistemic justice targeted at providing a sustainable platform for reflecting upon the impact of the past on the contemporary situation of Roma.

Victoria Shmidt is Senior Researcher at the University of Graz in Austria. Her main interest is to deepen the approaches toward race science and racial thinking as agents and structures of nation-building in Central Eastern European countries.

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is Associate Professor of sociology at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Her current research focuses on media coverage of refugees, border narratives and the migration-populism nexus.

Hungary since 1945

rpd von Klim, translated by Kevin McAleer

Romania under Communism

Denis Deletant

Bulgaria under Communism

Ivaylo Znepolski, Mihail Gruev, Momtchil Metodiev, Martin Ivanov, Daniel Vatchkov, Ivan Elenkov, Plamen Doynow

From Revolution to Uncertainty

The Year 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe

Edited by Joachim von Puttkamer, Wodzimierz Borodziej, and Stanislav Holubec

Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe

Edited by Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah and Marius Turda

Communism, Science and the University

Towards a Theory of Detotalitarianisation

Edited by Ivaylo Znepolski

A Nation Divided by History and Memory

Hungary in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Gbor Gyni

Historicizing Roma in Central Europe

Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice

Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories-of-Central-and-Eastern-Europe/book-series/CEE

First published 2021

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2021 Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

The right of Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-47198-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-03409-4 (ebk)

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