| This project analyzes and critiques the competing discursive attempts to constitute a unified collective identity for the European Roma people. It considers three layers of contested, yet interrelated, national and international discourse, focusing on their deep rhetorical structures, as well as on their dynamic discursive and non-discursive context. Rapid social, political, and economic changes, including the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the subsequent European Union enlargement, have impacted the ways in which minority collective identities are constructed by powerful social actors. The changing symbolic and material significance of national borders, as well as the simultaneity of competing ideologies like nationalism and cosmopolitanism within the international discursive space, have created both the need and the strategic opportunities for new minority and majority subjectivities. Nevertheless, even the most vocal attempts to constitute "Roma" often fail to do so and result in the re-establishment of existing social power relations. |
