Hegemonic Spatial Memorializations of the Roma in Hungary: Oppressive Forms

It is a forgotten part of history that between the late 19th and late 20th centuries more than 20 urban memory sites were dedicated in Hungary to prominent persons of Romani ethnicity, a minority group that faces often extreme discrimination. This research seeks to examine how these sites were implicated in the spatial control of Romani communities by dominant society. Combining critical analysis and historical research, it will show how the everyday life and cultural-political activism of the Roma were kept away from urban centres, sometimes aided by hegemonic strategies of pluralizing the urban heritage environment.

Following the histories of 10-15 of such sites to the present, this research will reconstruct the development of two types of largely invisible urban geographies in Hungary and their interrelations. One is the cultural map of these onetime or surviving, but obscured public representations, and the other is the geography of Romani urban life and Romani self-organization/activism. Relying on archival research and oral history interviews, it will investigate how dominant society kept the residence locations, community life and cultural-political activism of the Roma away from urban centres by spatial memorialisations on the urban margins. Some sites to be examined were established in central urban areas, but they often served oppressive ends, such as the nationalist appropriation and/or de-Romafying of individuals' memories, or stereotyping representations that ideologically endorsed policing the Roma in public urban spaces. These meanings will be negotiated through critical discourse analysis, extending to a wide range of written and visual sources.