Black Roma: Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)

Abstract

This essay brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth-century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of critical Romani studies. By close reading Molière's “Les fourberies de Scapin” (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft, among other objects, through the lens of critical race theory, this essay shows how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy.