How is racialized trauma affectively embedded in Romani sonic expression in the wake of genocide, slavery, and discrimination? In this talk I consider the role of musical performance in creating intimate spaces wherein processes of belonging, healing, and self-formation may take place. I analyze pivotal intersections of sorrow, sound, and emotion, ultimately putting forth a critical listening apparatus that helps attune us to the affective positionings of abject subjects as well as the enduring legacies and afterlives of histories of minoritization. By unravelling the song-story tightly bound to Romani sonic expression, a history of Romani feeling and the subjectivity there ensconced becomes audible.

Ioanida Costache is an ethnomusicologist, sound studies scholar, musician and videographer specializing in Romani artist practices. Her work explores the legacies of Romani historical trauma, and the feminist and de-colonial critiques of the present, inscribed in Romani music, sound, and art. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Stanford University, California, where she also completed her PhD in 2021 with a dissertation titled “Sounding Romani Sonic-Subjectivity: Counterhistory, Identity Formation, and Affect in Romanian-Roma Music.”