Sounding Roman traces the role of music performance in maintaining, shaping, and challenging ascribed social identities of Roman (“Gypsy”) groups, who constitute one of the most socially reviled and yet culturally romanticized minorities in Turkey. Roman communities have been a ubiquitous presence, contributing to social, cultural, and economic life since the Byzantine period in Anatolia up to the present. Alternately exoticized and reviled, Roman communities were valued for their occupational skills and entertainment services. Based on detailed historiographic study and twenty years of ethnographic work, this book examines the issue of cultural and musical representations for creating, maintaining, and contesting social identity practices through philosophical reflections on meaningful symbolic configurations in metaphoricity, iconicity, and mimesis paired with a sociological interrogation of unequal power relationships. Through these lenses, the book investigates the potential of musical performance to configure new social identities and open pathways for political action, while exploring the limits of cultural representation to effect meaningful social change. The book begins with historical representations of çingene as a marked ethnic and social group during the Byzantine to late Ottoman Empire. It then traces how such constructions were revised during the period of the modern Turkish Republic through the creation of a commercial musical genre, the Roman dance tune (Roman oyun havası). The book includes a companion website with illustrative texts, images, and audio examples.