'LOOKING IN ONE'S HAND': A LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF ROMA IN BRITAIN

Damian Le Bas will deliver a lecture on 'Looking in one's hand': a lecture on the history of Roma in Britain Join us for the lecture followed by a discussion with the lecturer and invited guests. The lecture will be in English, the discussion will be in English. The panelists of the discussion: Jo Clement Dr. Thomas Acton Dr. Adrian Marsh Dr. Colin Clark Moderator: Lisa Smith For more information about the Barvalipe Roma Online University please visit the ERIAC webpage where you can also find a complete schedule for the second course of the Barvalipe online lecture series together with the lectures from last year’s first course. https://eriac.org/barvalipe-roma-onli... Lecture Abstract Romani people became a constant presence in Britain in the early modern period. Early encounters with royalty and others were often peaceful, but within a century had led to expulsions and even an attempt at genocide. An acquired reputation for trickery coexisted with the fulfilment of crucial roles in the economy in both peacetime and war. Out of suspicion and intolerance grew relationships of mutual dependence and, at least in the arts, romanticisation. By the twentieth century, many Romani Travellers had left for the New World: for those who stayed, the adoption of new vehicles and jobs meant they were increasingly mobile, visible and ripe to be regarded as a social problem. Travellers became a cause of popular panic met by various political actions, with the 21st century now seeing some of the most hostile measures enacted in hundreds of years. In recent decades there has also been rapid growth in new forms of Romani self-expression, and a slow increase in engagement with formal education. The last three decades have also witnessed a large increase in the number of Romani people living in Britain, as families arrived from Central and Eastern Europe following the fall of Soviet Communism. The result is a country in which many Romani subcultures and various dialects of the Romani language coexist, though not always in awareness of each other.