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109 Chapter 7 Dynamics, Intricacy, and Multiplicity of Romani Identity in the United States  Suzuko Morikawa The rich history of Romani Americans has long been absent from U.S. history, even after the emergence of various ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s.1 Between 1.0 and 1.5 million people of Romani descent live in major American cities; Romani Americans maintain a multilayered identity as descendants of the Roma,2 people of northwestern India, in combination with their recent experience, mainly from Europe and the United States. Similar to about 10 million other Romani throughout the world,3 Romani American identity has been rigorously constructed by their unique history of migration and struggle, along with their shared linguistic, cultural, and biological heritage. Counteracting the stereotypes and preconceived notions of “Gypsies” as hidden, elusive, forgotten , and undesirable has proven difficult in the wake of a series of American and European newspapers and magazines that invoke negative images of Romani Americans as scammers and kidnappers who are unintelligent, mentally deficient, and unclean.4 The dynamics and depth of Romani history and culture have not been told subjectively from a Romani standpoint. Such objectification of the Romani people can be observed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, where Europeans imposed on the Roma the ambiguous label of “Egyptian,” which was later corrupted to the word “Gypsy.”5 The word “Gypsy” implies not only Renaissance England’s mistaken attribution of the Romani origin but also xenophobic attitudes toward people with dark skin that coincided with later notions of race that were developed within the European slave system. “Egyptian” had connotations of “stranger,” which derived from fear and contempt for the Romani and their itinerancy, especially in the latesixteenth -century Elizabethan period.6 In response to this imposed definition of “stranger,” or outsider, on the Romani community, people of Romani descent started to use the term “Roma” as their primary ethnonym in the sixteenth century , as the notion of “nation” emerged in rejection of the religious communities of the feudal era.7 This external categorization, in combination with the history of persecution, reinforced Romani ethnic identity through cultural distinction 110 Suzuko Morikawa from the outside world, which the Roma reified by calling non-Romani people, gadže (males) or gadžja (females).8 According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, ethnicity can be determined as a group formation process through culture, including language, customs, political identification, and descent, involving heredity and a sense of group origins .9 The central composite of internal Romani ethnicity stems from the Romani culture, meaning their language, nomadic way of life, customs and spirituality, and shared experience of persecution and discrimination that constructs social and political identification, as well as their ethnic origins in India. These elements of Romani ethnicity develop into the definition of Romani worldviews and subjectivity, which are demonstrated in community values. Despite the fact that Romani American identity is often considered ambiguous and irregular because of Romani diverse national origins, a cohesive collective ethnic consciousness has been sustained for more than 1,000 years based on inherited internal Romani identity; in the United States, this Romani identity has been synthesized with recent European and American culture, as well as the common experience of ethnic antagonism in the U.S. society. Therefore, the strength of Romani American identity derives from a multifaceted Romani collective consciousness based on multiplicity and dynamics in relation to the larger Romani community throughout the world and to other Asian communities in the United States. In this essay, I examine the cultural and historical relevance of Romani Americans as a part of the Asian American community while discussing the uniqueness and intricacies of the descendants of Roma. Quintessence of Romani Identity Indian Ancestry Citations from the Bible, especially from Genesis and Ezekiel, might be interpreted to suggest that the biblical origin of the Roma was as descendants of Noah or Abraham; the Roma have also been deemed as descendents of the Babylonians, Nubians, Abyssinians, or Celtic Druids.10 Coinciding with the phrenological argument that supports an Egyptian origin for the Roma because of the similarity of the size and shape of skulls of ancient Egyptians and the Roma,11 the theory that Egypt is a place of origin for the Romani people has been critically challenged by later Romanologists based on formidable linguistic evidence. Linguistic analysis of the Romani language indicates that it originated from the Dom, a Sanskrit-derived language from northern...

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