Listening for the Romani Holocaust

February 6, 2020 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time

A public lecture by Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate in Music, Stanford University)
2019-2020 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Cosponsored by USC Thornton School of Music

If listening is a form of acknowledgment, can we hear the Roma? In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades. Drawing on ethnographic work and archives of oral testimony, Costache considers the power of orality and musical testimony as sites of memory, in which a counterhistory of Romani suffering can be traced. In attending to song-stories and oral histories, listeners gain intimate understanding of how survivors position themselves vis-a-vis the atrocious trauma inflicted upon them.

Ioanida Costache is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in Music where she holds the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship.. Her research explores issues of race and ethnicity, performance/construction of identity, cultural memory, trauma, and history as they intersect in Romanian-Romani music.