Politicizing Roman and the Folklorization of Ethnicity

Two fundamental shifts in national policies post-2000 set into motion new forms of Roman expression: Turkey’s responses to European Union accession process; Urban Renewal Law 5366. The first promoted Roman as a model minority through the establishment of Roman cultural associations (dernek-s), thereby opening up political space for Roman ethnic identity. The second mobilized extensive expropriation of Roman neighborhoods under Law 5366. Using pedagogy-by-performance to “make oneself known” (tanıtma), dernek-s began forging an emergent Roman-as-folklore. I trace the uneven process of folkloric canon-formation through three performances: an international festival in Istanbul, in Keşan’s annual festival, and in response to the destruction of Istanbul’s entertainment district, Sulukule. The collision of dernek-inspired political action with land expropriation were encapsulated in discourses surrounding—and enabling—municipal destruction of Sulukule. The chapter reflects on the problem of heightened attention to Sulukule as a form of political iconicization that eclipsed suffering experienced in other sites.

Inscribing çingene in Late Ottoman Cultural Forms

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Ottoman social order and urban popular culture. Social upheavals contributed to the intensified display of the çingene stereotype, with the çingene representing the experience of social marginalization. Playing out the anxieties of urban audiences as they confronted problems of modernity, urbanism, social disruption, and moral decay, the stereotypical figure of the çingene remained consistent from the late nineteenth century to the 1990s. A discussion of the dramatic nineteenth century Tanzimat reforms is followed by analyses of çingene characters in karagöz shadow puppetry, kanto theatrical songs, and Ottoman literature. The çingene was portrayed in two irreconcilable types: as an essentialized, nomad in pastoral rural settings; as the polluted degenerate and potentially contagious agent of urban chaos, social disorder, and moral decadence. By portraying the “çingene” as the quintessential “other” among an array of diverse social types, these forms rendered the anxiety-producing urban social landscape in stark relief.

Exnominating Turk, Hypernominating çingene

The dramatic political shift from the Ottoman Imperial polity to that of an ethnonational state was implemented by creating the “Turk” as the singular subject citizen of the new Republic. To shore up a new national identity through contrast against non-Turkish others, culture power holders deployed musical discourses that effectively folded in qualities and attributes of “non-Turkish others” into the representations of çingene and negative evaluations of Romani musical labor. This strategy enabled “others” to disappear on the one hand and to hypermark çingene as the epitome of alterity against which Turkish music could be positively valued. This complex set of processes enabled the creation of Turkish folk and classical genres as legitimated categories, which formed the basis of a national musical canon. Against these structural political and cultural transformations, a critical reading of biographies and melancholy reminiscences about Romani artists Nasip Hanım and Tahsin Bey discloses the extraordinary and yet everyday contributions of professional Romani musicians. These artists mediated class and ethnic differences while maintaining musical practices that were undergoing dramatic cultural management.

Romani Professional Entertainers in the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman rulers and members of the aristocracy utilized spectacular displays as “theatre state” to effectively institute and maintain power over their subjects and relied on the captivating skills of Romani professional entertainers. Romani entertainers survived through developing polyglot repertoires and styles from their stigmatized social position, existing in the Ottoman world as aesthetic cosmopolitans. Ottoman rulers implemented controls over such displays of music and dance due to their desire to curb inherently coercive affective power. The histories of entertainer types are traced, ranging from male and female as professional dancers (köçek; çengi), specialists on zurna, violin, G clarinet, percussion, and mehter military instruments. A description of çiftetelli and karşılama dance forms and their characteristic movements is followed by an analysis of two recordings performed by Romani musicians from the early twentieth century in order to explore the parameters of keriz musical improvisation and kıvrak melodies that inspire bodily movement.

The Poetics of Singing Roman

This chapter traces a poetics of emergent meaning in sözlü Roman oyun havası from static iconicity drawn from çingene references in kanto songs through musicians’ creative incorporation of improvised poetic mani and shouted hocali forms. While expressing communal reactions to specifically Roman experiences, the inclusion of patricularistic references from mani and hocali inscribed revised social distinctions along gendered, generational, class, and status lines. Through musical analysis and observations of musicians creating new songs, I demonstrate how musicians drew on keriz-style improvisations to expand melodic repertoires for song settings in response to the increased demand for new and relevant dance tunes. Commercial circulation and copyrighting of these songs also increased tensions between artists themselves and studio heads, thus reshaped community-based practices of borrowing and performing. The chapter ends with narrations of three performance events to illustrate the dynamic relationship between an ongoing metaphoricity of sound to a mimesis of enlarged presence and pluralized identities.

Toward a History of Social Construction

This chapter discusses the historical origins and experiences of Roma and related groups in Anatolia from Byzantine to the Ottoman Empires. Byzantine and Ottoman philosophical beliefs regarding moral order informed administrative controls on subject populations. In particular, social segregational practices implemented during the Byzantine and Ottoman administrative periods facilitated exploitation of Romani labor, particularly for auxiliary military services, agrarian work, commercial trade, and other marginalized services such as entertainment. Social marginalization was reinforced by government edicts and sanctions, and furthered by physical segregation and marginalization into Romani neighborhoods (mahalle). The experience of place from which Roma expressed their sense of belonging to a community was also shaped by their emplacement in the larger social hierarchy. Because most extant writings regarding the history of Roma were in the hands of those institutions wielding political power over Roma, this chapter also explores alternative interpretations of official government texts and church sanctions.

Conclusions and Openings

A musical collage based on Roman song lyrics provides the framework to explore the relationship between Turkish Roman musical practices, social representation and political agency. This chapter recaps the author’s argument regarding the symbolic power of iconicity, metaphoricity, and mimesis for providing alternative possibilities, and thus empower marginalized communities. Musical innovations at the time of publication demonstrate that musicians continue to forge responsive expressions of Roman belonging through metaphoric layering that retain older elements discussed in this book with new technologies and styles. Ethnomusicological and historiographic analyses of Turkish Roman expressions reveal that forms and practices of social identities are as much relational as they are grounded in each community’s unique matrices of collective experiences. In the current era of rising nationalist politics in which Romani groups are increasingly targeted, this chapter ends with a meditation on the promises and limits of cultural expression to challenge social and political inequities.

Presenting Turkish Roman

The advent of “world music” as a commercial genre in 1990s impacted Turkish music markets. Turkish producers tapped Istanbul Roman musicians to blend local sounds with musical elements marked as “Western.” Drawing on techniques of keriz and doğaçlama, musicians explored changes in instrumentation, incorporated Western European harmonies and jazz riffs to sound an enlarged cosmopolitan social identity. Through exploiting “Roman-as-World-Music,” producers and managers drew on locally-instantiated ideologies about jazz to forge a transnationally-marketable project. A historical review of jazz in Turkey uncovers the historical precedent for forging musical interlinkages beyond Turkish borders, which musicians dew upon as an expression of actually-existing cosmopolitanism. Musical analysis of several works illustrate the process of metaphoric accretion of older iconic musical sounds with new and “Western” elements to signify new cosmopolitan social references. This chapter also investigates modalities within discrepant cosmopolitanism to reveal the contingent nature of cosmopolitan social formations and power differentials.

Recording Roman

Following the success of nightclub Roman recordings, the burgeoning 45 rpm industry sought to expand into regional markets by recording Roman wedding musicians and their new Roman oyun havası-s. Biographies of Mu[h]acir İbra[h]im, Kemanî Cemal Çınarlı, Deli Selim Kızılcıklar, Kemanî [H]acı Üründülcü, and Kadir Ürün[dülcü] illustrate the de-centering of Istanbul as a musical center and the increased importance of new musical ideas and styles from Edirne. Through oral history interviews and musical analysis, I trace the emergence of particularly “Roman”-marked rhythms, dance tunes with words, and instrumentation from local celebrations into the studios. By tracing this history, I excavate the metaphoric process by which musicians layered new elements into established genres, generating sonically mimetic expressions that reflected and projected new senses of belonging. Recordings also introduced new power dynamics into social relations between musicians and their audiences, while also increasing public forums for the creation, negotiation, and maintenance of cultural projections of Roman identities. The unexpected popularity of the dance song “Mastika Mastika” led to the increasing demand for—and production of—Roman dance songs.

Prelude: Sounding Social Identity

Opening with a description of a Roman oyun havası (Roman dance tune), this chapter describes the gestures, movements, and self-identifying references that this genre evokes. While European, Ottoman and Turkish literature seem to have a rich body of information regarding “Gypsies,” those representations are largely presented in the absence of actual Romani voices. Given the historical experiences of social exclusion political marginalization and discrimination by Turkish Roman, the struggle for control over self-naming was also channeled through and refined in the ongoing creation of their own narratives in commodified and mass-mediated Roman oyun havası. The philosophical concepts of iconicity, metaphoricity, and mimesis as applied to Roman oyun havası suggest one means for examining the dynamic relationship between cultural practices, performances, and their social effects. This chapter also discusses issues of representation in historiographic research, provides an outline of the book and chapter topics, and describes the author’s field work and positionality.