Precarious Identity, Tenacious Stereotype: The Making of Romani Alterity in Late- and Post-Ottoman Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the generative power of categories and the state practices based upon them. The case of the Roma in the late Ottoman and early Republican contexts illustrates the productive role of definition and repetition in turning contingent, historical social categories into ahistorical “truths” that are assumed to be always-already there. The dissertation explores the construction of difference in late- and post-Ottoman Turkey by focusing on the making of Romani alterity in its separate but overlapping religious, ethnic, and racial registers––an alterity produced by legislation, implemented by administration, negotiated by the Roma, and represented in the press and in literary form to be consumed and reproduced by the non-Roma as the intended audience. Moreover, this study views the Roma as agents, historical actors among a plurality of late-Ottoman and early Republican actors. It does so by prioritizing their direct interactions with the state, insofar as the sources permit, in order to show how they negotiated the terms of their membership in society in spite of the latter’s often active resistance and exclusionary policies.Conceived as an ambiguous socio-fiscal category in the early modern period, Romani alterity and the state’s preoccupation with it became more pronounced in the nineteenth century as the centralizing Ottoman state began employing such modern demographic technologies as censuses and identity documents. In turn, the Roma negotiated their belonging to the larger Muslim community through the use of the long-standing tradition of petitioning. Spatial and mobility practices were just as generative of an increasingly distinct Romani identity. The late nineteenth century saw the reification of a “nomadic Gypsy culture” concurrently with its subordination to hegemonic sedentarism, often framed as a “civilizing mission.” It was during the early decades of the Turkish Republic that the Roma, and particularly those that were assumed to be nomadic, were targeted in legislation, further inscribing Romani alterity within the ethnic program of the nation-building period. As the Turkish state engaged in demographic engineering, the Roma were once again intent on professing and performing their belonging through petitions, even as legislation and its practice rendered them more visible and vulnerable to the state’s intervention. The reification of Romani “difference” through inscription in official documents was further reinforced by its intellectualization in literary and lexical texts. The repeated dissemination of resilient stereotypes about the Roma in popular publications collectively constructed a distorted image of the Roma in conversation with each other. These cultural idioms of alterity, themselves a product of the social imaginary of their time, had a reproductive function in not only influencing further circulation, but also informing the consciousness of the legislators, and added an authoritative discursive layer to the construction of an increasingly ethnicized and racialized, and unmistakably subordinated Romani identity.