DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE PRESENTS

The Roma: The Most Misunderstood Culture in the (Western) World

      A Slideshow and Lecture by Dick Blau

Date:10^h February 2011 Time: 4pm Venue: AS/5 05-09A

Gypsies – their proper name is Roma -- are  a stereotyped people. In Western societies, they are subject of widespread fantasies, both negative and positive.   To name but a few,  they are seen as mysterious wanderers, passionate lovers, habitual thieves, and brilliant musicians: the ultimate Bohemians. On the one hand, they are held to be the symbols of absolute freedom and victimhood.. Beautiful losers, so to speak. On the other they are thought to be  irredeemably anti-social, a disruptive presence, unfit for civilized society.  Gypsies were  marked by the Nazis for extermination in the Holocaust. Today, they are objects of widespread persecution in the European societies where they live. Based on fieldwork in a Romani community in northern Greece,  this slide/lecture presentation offers another, more nuanced view of  “Gypsy” reality and prospects.        

Dick Blau is Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of three photo-ethnographies on music and culture: Polka Happiness(1994), Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Musicians and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia (2002), and Skyros Carnival(2011).