The Roma Collective Memory and the Epistemological Limits of Western Historiography

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the history that has been created about the Roma people is a white construct which has primarily produced an ontological search for, and legitimation of, white identity. Problematizing the history that has been built around the Roma, I examine how the epistemological foundations of history as a discipline are influenced by the system of domination underlying European modernity and its civilizational ambitions. In my reading, objectivity and faith in “the facts” of history constitute an “epistemological naivety” which evades any critical examination of coloniality, the abyssal lines of modernity and the implications of situated knowledge.