Emotional Excess and Racialisation in the Nineteenth-Century Romanian Novel

Résumé

Based on the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel (MDRR1: 1845–1900), this paper discusses the depiction and racialisation of Roma affect at a time when Roma slavery in Moldavia and Wallachia was either still in the process of being abolished or recently dismantled. The analysis relies on complex lexical searches within the corpus, using keywords pertaining to ethnicity, lifestyle, labour, and even pejorative terms associated with this minority, in order to showcase the Romani characters and their emotional response to their environment. By combining distant and close reading, my main objective is to demonstrate that, in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, emotion and emotional excess were used programmatically: either as a racialised trope signalling the inferiority and uncivilised nature of the Roma or as a rehumanising strategy meant to cause an empathetic reaction and moral outrage among the readers of abolitionist prose (Woods 2015). Thus, this racially conscious investigation into the depiction of affectivity should highlight the replication of colonial representational patterns in a semi-peripheral literature vying for international recognition (Parvulescu & Boatcă 2022) while also negotiating its own understanding of the body politic (Trencsényi 2009). For this purpose, I will be drawing on postcolonial classics like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, as well as more recent writing on “the emotional politics of slavery” (Dwyer 2012), which reveals the transnational network of abolitionist thought (connecting America, Britain, and Eastern Europe) and its shortcomings. On the one hand, this sheds light on the ambivalence of emotion and its malleable ethical function rooted in the psychological theories of emotion circulating at the time (Westwood 2023). On the other hand, starting from Kyla Schuller’s (2012) and Zachary Samalin’s (2022) historical accounts of affect theory and its colonial sources, I aim to trace the influence of nineteenth-century scientific dogma on the Romanian intellectual landscape, the import of evolutionary theories (Koszor-Codrea 2021), and the consequent racialisation of affectivity as depicted in fiction.