Europe’s Others: Jews and Gypsies in European Imagination

Instructor: Pavel Barša

Course Description

There are two academic approaches to the stereotypes applied by Europeans to the members of the groups that they identify as “others”. One school emphasizes the endogenous logic of this “othering” as a mechanism of a collective self-constitution of European nations and rejects the attempts of the other school to explain these stereotypes by specific social positions and related cultural features of those groups. With the help of the books by Yuri Slezkine and Michael Stewart (among others) the course analyzes the modern European images of the Jews and Gypsies from the standpoint of the second school of thought.

1) Introduction

2) Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press 2004, Chapter 1: Mercury’s Sandals: The Jews and other Nomads, pp. 4-20.

3) Yuri Slezkine, ibid., Chapter 1, pp. 20-39.

4) Yuri Slezkine, ibid., Chapter 2: Swann’s Nose: The Jews and other Moderns, pp. 40-60.

5) Yuri Slezkine, ibid., Chapter 2, pp. 60-75.

6) Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies, Westview Press, Oxford 1997, Chapter 1: The Lowest of the Low, pp. 1-13; Chapter 2: The Gypsy Work, pp. 15-26.

7) M. Stewart, ibid., Chapter 3: A Place of Their Own, pp. 27-37, pp. 43-49.

8) M. Stewart, ibid., Chapter 13: Conclusion: Marginality, Resistance, and Ideology, pp. 232-248.

9) Judith Okely, Cultural Ingenuity and traveling autonomy: not copying, just choosing in: Thomas Acton, Gary Mundy (eds.): Romani culture and Gypsy identity, University of Hertfordshire Press, Hatfield 1999, pp. 188-203

10) Katie Trumpener, The Time of the Gypsies: A „People without History“ in the Narratives of the West, Critical Inquiry 18, University of Chicago, Summer 1992, pp. 843-865

11) Katie Trumpener, The Time of the Gypsies: A „People without History“ in the Narratives of the West, Critical Inquiry 18, University of Chicago, Summer 1992, pp. 865-884.

12) Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850), transl. W. A. Ellis (1894), The Wagner Library, Edition 1.1 http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0066.pdf

13) Anna G. Piotrowska, Liszt and the issue of so called Gypsy Music, Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology, 13, 2013, p. 127 – 140.

14) Concluding Discussion

Additional Bibliography

Andrea Geier, Iulia-Karin Patrut, ‚Deutsche Kunst‘? Zur Wissensproduktion über ‚Zigeuner‘ und Juden in Kunstdiskursen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Herbert Uerlings, Iulia-Karin Patrut (Hrsg.), ‚Zigeuner‘ und Nation. Repräsentation – Inklusion – Exklusion, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2008, pp. 151-168.

Patrick Williams, The Invisibility of the Kalderash of Paris: Some Aspects of the Economic Activity and Settlement Patterns of the Kalderash Rom of the Paris Suburbs, in: Urban Antropology, no. 3-4, 11, 1982, pp. 315-330

Franz Liszt, Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie, Breitkopf und Härtel 1881 (1959)

https://imslp.org/wiki/Des_Boh%C3%A9miens_et_de_leur_musique_en_Hongrie_(Liszt,_Franz)

Requirements

Participation in class discussions, one oral presentation of readings and final written examination.