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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 295–311

Chapter 16
The cultural memory of Roma slavery in Europe

Aferim! (2015)

The public memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery began spreading in West Africa after World War II, but in Europe and the Americas it has gained attention only in the last few decades. Notwithstanding the fresh comparative, interdisciplinary approaches to slavery arguing for historical revision and the imaginative possibilities of cultural memory, postmemory, and prosthetic memory, the history and memory of Roma slavery in Europe are still marginalized subjects. This chapter compares the greatest slave system in modern Europe to forms of Mediterranean and US slavery through a transatlantic approach to the history of Roma slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia. A comparative perspective on the cultural memory of Roma slavery reveals the durable, wide-ranging effects of institutionalized racism, as well as the resisting force of cultural postmemory products such as Radu Jude’s 2015 film Aferim! in representing the silenced history of Roma slavery and the role it played in producing a racialized ontology of Roma ‘blackness’.
Keywords: Transatlantic slavery, Roma slavery, Aferim! Europe, USA, memory, postmemory, history, racism, Roma blackness
Article outline
  • The slavery of Roma in Wallachia and Moldavia (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries): Questions of memory, history, and racism
  • Aferim! The cultural memory of Roma slavery and the working of race
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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