Print Culture And The Roma In North America

This thesis contributes to the ongoing work of undoing the erasure of the historically marginalized Roma through a retrieval, taxonimization, and analysis of a variety of ephemeral North American printed texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The texts under analysis were taken from several digitized archives, and they provide a representational sample of trends in depictions of the Roma across the much larger body of texts located in these archives. The first chapter discusses the research methodologies used for textual retrieval and revealed data trends. This thesis then analyzes these selected texts and presents a framework for understanding thematic shifts in textual representations of the Roma, shifts which correspond to notable changes in North American print culture. Chapters two, three, and four feature different types of texts and describe these shifts, which center on representations of the Roma as various narrative forms: the Roma as myth, as news, and as romance. This analysis helps us better understand the role of print in producing and reifying stereotypes of the Roma, and, thus, to challenge those stereotypes.