Slavery, Cultural Trauma, and Romani Identity: Between Reconciliation with the Past and Internal Coloniality

Abstract

This article develops and tests a methodological approach for studying the memory of Romani slavery that transcends oral history and archival research sources, treating local mnemonics – such as oikonyms, spatial morphology, and institutionalized sources – as carriers of memory. By grounding and applying this methodology to the case of Dezrobiți village, I show how the cultural trauma of slavery reveals itself even where silence, denial, or fragmentation obscure direct narratives, collective memory, and symbols.