edited by Hedina Tahirović-Sijerčić and Cynthia Levine-Rasky
Romani Women in Canada: Spectrum of the Blue Water:is grounded upon Romani women’s lived experience as writers, essayists, visual artists, and activists. Reflecting the panoply of women’s voices, the book links everyday experience and a social critique of the factors that enable and constrain women’s lives. Through incisive creativity, pragmatic action, and affective networks, the book is a consolidation of diverse expressions of agency and collectivity. Sharing a will to advance the dignity of women’s lives, the contributors are as plural as their subject matter. Canadian Romani women are impressively diverse in their attachments, status, beliefs, and identities.
The chapters in this book illustrate this multiplicity by traversing creative practices and writing motifs. Contributors are visual artists, fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, scholars, and essayists. Reflecting the breadth of contributors’ creative genres, the book is eclectic in content with multiple forms of writing and images.
The book features essays on activism, identities, and representation. The essays stand alongside creative writing that includes creative non-fiction, short stories, and poetry. Photographs of visual art and black-and-white portraits of Canadian Romani women will complement the written textual components.
There are no other edited volumes of essays, creative writing, and images created by Romani women in North America. This volume thus fills a pressing need in the literature that crosses boundaries between cultural workers and activists, academic and general readers, and across academic disciplines such as English Literature, Comparative Literature, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Social Movements, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Spectrum of the Blue Watermakes an important contribution to interdisciplinary knowledge about the Roma, and Romani women’s engagement in community-building.