Reclaiming Folk in Discourses about Music. Kotel Roma’s Strategies against Antigypsyism

This article analyses how Romani residents of Kotel, a small Bulgarian town presented by its municipality as a “model of [..] Roma integration” (Kotelnews 2022) challenges essentialist narratives that are rooted in antigypsyism. In particular, I observe how some of my interlocutors reappropriate the Bulgarian adjectives “chisto” (clean/pure) and “authentichno” (authentic) – used in the communist past to describe what was constructed as “narodna muzika” (folk music) – to talk about their musical practices. I explore how they site themselves in relation to the established contemporary discourse of “integration” and to the society in which they live but are not always considered as totally belonging. Through the analysis of a corpus consisting of video excerpts and tape recordings collected during fieldwork, I argue that Kotel Roma claim their place in Bulgarian society as active contributors to the transmission and development of culture, not so much by reproducing the ideology of “purity” and “authenticity” but rather by using tools that a plurality of musical styles and genres can provide.