Staging Citizenship

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Ioana Szeman. Staging Citizenship

Staging Citizenship. Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Performance and the Citizenship Gap

The Citizenship Gap in Pod: Basic Citizenship Rights and Cultural Citizenship

‘Roma Culture’ Clashes: The State, the EU and Roma NGOs

Roma in Romanian and European History: Stereotypes and Erasures

Persecution and Erasures in the Twentieth Century

Methodology

Chapter Outline. Part I: Poor Roma, Roma Activists and the Romanian State

Part II: Roma Performance and the Citizenship Gap: From Exoticism to Creative Resistance

Notes

Chapter 1

‘We Will Build a Beautiful Future Together’ NGO Historiography, Roma Culture and Monoethnic Nationalism

Outside the Archive/the Outside Archive: Consuming Roma Culture in the Marketplace

Minor Histories: From Slavery to the Holocaust

Minor Histories and Social Etymologies: ‘Ţigani’ and Slaves

The Roma and Romanian Nationalism

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 2

Living in the Citizenship Gap. Roma and the Permanent State of Emergency in Pod

Life as a State of Emergency in Pod

Armando

Recycling: From Survival to Entrepreneurship

Dumitru and Irina

Mirela

Building a Life in Pod. Adam

Miki

Vanesa

Black versus White: Gendered Racialization and the Citizenship Gap

Vanesa, Giani and Mona

‘You Are where You Are Coming from’: Racialization by Contagion

Alex and Mira

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 3

Too Poor to Have Culture? The Politics of Authenticity in Roma NGO Training

Setting the Scene

The PHARE Programmes: Improving the Situation of which Roma?

Training the Trainers: Performing Neoliberal Civility

Closing the Gap: Authentic Artisans and Selfish Entrepreneurs

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 4

Performing Bollywood. Young Roma Dance Cultural Citizenship

The Citizenship Gap in the Classroom

From All-Roma Schools to Special Schools: The Persistence of Discrimination

Blaming the Parents

Quotas for Roma Students: Resistance and Lack of Information

Educating and Informing via Roma-led Television Programmes

Together: Dancing across Cultures, in Mainstream and Special Schools

From Csingeralas to Bollywood: Rejecting Authenticity and Claiming Cultural Citizenship

Bollywood Dance and Roma Counterpublics

Notes

Chapter 5

Consuming Exoticism/Reimagining Citizenship. Romanian Nationalism and Roma Counterpublics on Romanian Television

Consuming ‘Gypsy Chic’ and Scapegoating Roma in Gypsy Soaps

Roma Caravan: Roma-led Romanian Television

Between Ţigani and ‘Palaces with Turrets’: Can Roma Speak on Mainstream Romanian Television?

Roma Counterpublics: Watching Gypsy Soaps in Pod and Beyond

Young Roma Counterpublics and Gypsy Soaps

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter 6

The Ambivalence of Success. Roma Musicians and the Citizenship Gap in Romania

‘Gypsy Music’, Nationalisms and the ESC

Manele, Roma Musicians and Racialized Musical Hierarchies in Romania

From ‘Gypsy Frenzy’ to Manele: What they Talk about when they Talk about Gypsies

‘Ioniţă and Viorica Trump the Ceauşescus’: Roma Musicians, Dystopia and Counterpublics

Conclusion

Notes

Conclusion

Unlearning the Forgetting

Note

Bibliography

Index

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DANCE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

General Editors:

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I am a gadgi (non-Roma) and Romanian citizen of mixed Romanian-Hungarian descent, with a Ph.D. gained in the United States and currently working in the United Kingdom. Some of my non-Roma Romanian friends and acquaintances rolled their eyes upon hearing about my research topic, and worried that I would reiterate or add to many Westerners’ mistaking of Romanians for Roma; some asked me ‘please don’t make us all look like Ţigani.’ My Western location at the time of my fieldwork in Romania, being the United States and, after 2005, London, bestowed upon me a certain cachet among some of my informants: one of the Romnja in Pod decided I was Spanish, a nation to which she felt connected; one Romni from the village of Clejani called me a ‘foreign gadgi’, as opposed to a local, Romanian gadgi. At times the perception of my identity shifted – for example, when a lawyer asked me whether I was a Romni friend’s daughter, even though we were both in our thirties. This instance, when I was taken for a Romni by a non-Roma, was a shocking (for me but not, as it turned out, for my Romni friend) reminder of the widespread gendered stereotypes about Romnja as young, over-fertile mothers with dozens of children. Several times, when I accompanied friends and witnessed similar situations, the casualness of such incidents and the everydayness of racism really struck me. My shock reflected my privileged position: for my Roma friends and acquaintances these incidents were not surprising. As I show in Chapter 2, there was no shortage of such incidents: encounters in hospitals, schools, shops and police stations, and often with state employees, demonstrated this everyday racism.

In many instances my ethnographic journey involved making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Performance and theatre scholar Baz Kershaw discusses radical theatre, which has the power to change the ideological inclination and worldviews of audiences: ‘theatre which mounts a radical attack on the status quo may prove deceptive. The slow burning fuse of efficacy may be invisible’ (1992, 28). I see the slow burning fuse metaphor as an apt description of the change in subjectivity that I experienced when making the strange familiar and vice versa. The slow burning fuse was started for me most likely at a Christmas celebration in Pod, when I visited with non-Roma friends. In these moments, when I was allowed into people’s lives, the expected power balance was temporarily redressed; instead of only witnessing suffering and injustice, I spent enjoyable moments with Pod friends. These became turning points in the co-witnessing process of ethnography, when the initial impulse, of seeing Pod as a problem that needed a solution, receded to some extent. I started listening to people more carefully, to their music, their dances and their actions. My sense of outrage at their situation never disappeared, but it became equally important for me to document their other stories – in addition to stories about injustice and discrimination – from the way they saw Gypsy soaps to their perspectives on belonging in Romania.

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