Korff, Johannes Valentin;
(2025)
Roma in Global Popular Culture since 1945: Discourses of Othering in Comics, Animated Films, and Games.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
In this thesis, I am exploring various discourses on Romani representation in global popular culture since 1945. While the portrayal of Roma in European entertainment literature prior to 1945 has been researched in some detail, other media, regions, and historical periods have received much less attention, leading to potential blind spots, which obscure other traditions of the Romani stigma. These blind spots are considered in the context of global popular culture. For this purpose, I examine American, Francophone, and Japanese comics, animated films, and games since 1945. It becomes evident that the Romani stigma is neither uniform across the globe, nor that it is across different types of media. Rather, comics, animated films, and games each use distinct conventions to represent the Romani stigma, and these conventions are heavily influenced by the cultural context in which these media products originate, even if they engage with a global audience: The portrayal of fortune-telling Romani characters, while prevalent across all media, diverges significantly between video games and literature. Video games are obsessed with intertwining these characters with historical fantasies, especially in medieval scenarios in worlds beyond ours, a setting less common in literature with Romani characters. In addition, this motif is not merely reproduced but is also updated to reflect social and media changes, thereby acquiring new meanings over time. I conclude that someone who prefers video games to literature or Japanese to Franco-Belgian comics may more often encounter contrasting perspectives regarding Romani representation than someone who prefers the other. Different cultures of entertainment each offer different ideas of motifs. Accordingly, the analysis of these variants provides a basis to correctly assess the evolutions of the Romani stigma, which are often overlooked by scholars and reduced to its reproduction.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Roma in Global Popular Culture since 1945: Discourses of Othering in Comics, Animated Films, and Games |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > CMII |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207224 |
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