Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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culture and Roma history has become increasingly commodified in the celebration of a consumable version of culture and a selective and perfunctory engagement with the past. The Roma Fair offered Roma cultural artefacts for consumption through the commodification of Roma identities in the context of a general expansion of the market and consumer culture in Romania. Indeed, during the autumn following the Roma Fair, the first Romanian branch of the multinational company Pier 1 Imports opened in Bucharest, offering well-off Romanians ‘authentic’ Developing World artefacts and ethnic chic, filtered through Western taste and endorsement, and available at Western prices. Such commodification has maintained the citizenship gap for Roma by harmonizing neoliberalism and monoethnic nationalism.
The state has imposed a form of what Rey Chow defines as ‘coercive mimeticism’: an identitarian, existential, cultural or textual process whereby those defined as ‘ethnics’ are expected to ‘resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imaginings of them as ethnics’ (2002, 107). The Roma Fair illustrates the tension between the state’s imposition of monoethnic paradigms and the Roma activists’ attempt to bridge the citizenship gap from within those paradigms. I will show how activists at the fair turned a critical eye on the cultural politics of Roma representations across the centuries, and through NGO historiography assessed the construction of national history in Romania. The fair put forward the perspective of minor history and challenged monoethnic national history by including Roma as subjects of national history. It made visible subaltern Roma identities and addressed an emergent Roma counterpublic.1
Lastly, I consider the appropriation and erasure of Roma culture and its survival through oral transmission across generations, using a minor historical and transnational approach to discuss the institution of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in relation to the construction of Romanian folklore and Romanian nationalism. Focusing on the narratives told by archival evidence, pictures and books at the exhibition, and by the performances, voices and negotiations taking place outside, I point to the cracks that the fair opened up in the grand narrative of monoethnic nationalism told by the museum and countless other institutions in Romania.
Outside the Archive/the Outside Archive: Consuming Roma Culture in the Marketplace
The 2002 Roma Fair, entitled ‘Mahala şi Ţigănie’ (‘Slums and Gypsydom’) included a wide range of participants, both Roma and gadge: Roma activists, artists, students, Roma craftspeople from across the country, prominent and lesser-known musicians, magicians, Roma businesspeople and leaders and so on. Jointly organized by the Resource Centre for Roma Communities, and the Mircea Dinescu Poetry Foundation under the auspices of the European Commission and the Romanian Ministry of Culture, it was not an exclusively Roma event, and the prominent Romanian poet and intellectual Mircea Dinescu was one of its organizers.
Inside the museum, the fair occupied the foyer, where launch events for academic and literary books were held, including the memoirs of the magician Maria, Queen of White Magic. The book exhibition featured works by Roma scholars, such as: Roma Slavery in the Romanian Territories, an important work of NGO historiography edited by Vasile Ionescu, one of the organizers from the Roma association Aven Amentza; volumes of poetry by Roma poet Luminiţa Cioabă, who was present at the fair; and the Bible in Romani. In the room designated ‘Laolaltă’ (‘Together’), which hosted temporary exhibitions on minorities, the exhibition ‘Între o Del şi o Beng’ (‘Between God and the Devil’) provided a historical timeline of the Roma presence in arts and culture. There was a Roma NGO forum in one of the larger auditoria, and a Roma student ball playfully entitled ‘O Soarea la Mahala’ (‘An Evening in the Mahala’). The museum courtyard hosted an exhibition of traditional Roma crafts and several open-air concerts, with bands from across the country performing under the banner ‘Muzică Lăutărească Veche’ (‘Old Lăutari Music’).
As one stepped into the museum courtyard, where Roma of different denominations were selling objects, ranging from costumes to household items, among the transplanted peasant houses that constitute the museum’s permanent fixtures, there was a sense of a return of the repressed in the very heart of Romanian nationalism. Two Kelderara women with ribbon-woven plaits and colourful outfits proudly stood in front of a table displaying similar garments (see Figure 1.1). They were selling long pleated skirts and matching blouses made of a patchwork of multicoloured fabrics – red, green, blue, yellow and purple. Each skirt had two layers: one, wrapped around the waist, covered the body, and the other, apron-like, lay on top. The blouses were also very colourful, short and very loose, almost like skirts for the upper body. Browsing the stall alongside many other visitors, I was shocked to find that the asking prices for single garments ranged from 50 to 100 euros: the average monthly wage in Romania at the time was roughly 100. The women were evidently targeting Western tourists, or newly rich Romanians who had acquired Western habits and Western pockets. At the next stall, two long-bearded, long-moustached silversmiths in wide-brimmed black hats were demonstrating the art of jewellery making. Further along, a few young women in urban clothes were offering their services in white magic, described in the fair brochure as divination and palm reading. On the left-hand side of the yard, Kelderara men dressed in urban clothes were displaying huge copper containers of various shapes, popular in Romania and used for the home brewing of alcohol. These Roma wore modern attire and were visibly well off, with Kelderara men and women alike wearing gold chains, big gold rings, and large gold earrings for the women.
Figure 1.1. Kelderara Roma selling outfits and copper pots at the Roma Fair, Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, October 2002 (photo by Ioana Szeman).
Figure 1.2. Kelderar Rom on the left and Rudara selling wooden household objects (right); in the background the stand of the Kelderara, and a television reporter. Roma Fair, Romanian Peasant Museum, October 2002 (photo by Ioana Szeman).
On the right-hand side, placed more marginally and with fewer visitors, several women dressed in subdued colours and dark scarves were selling garments that looked nothing like the Kelderara outfits and seemed identical to the peasant garb exhibited within the museum: white shirts, long white gowns with coloured embroidery, dark scarves and so on. The asking prices for these items did not exceed 20 each. Across from these women, woodcarvers wearing dark trousers and coats and black hats were selling wooden spoons, bowls and pots (see Figure 1.2). Unlike the Kelderara, these participants did not conform to popular depictions of Roma. I identified them from the official brochure as possibly Rudara.
The live demonstrations at the fair were part of the Programme of Revaluing Traditional Roma Crafts, which brought ‘traditional’ crafts and craftspeople to the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. The fair brochure identified the live demonstrations as a first stage in a larger programme designed to adapt traditional Roma crafts to the demands of the market economy and ‘improve tools, working techniques and product development’ (Roma Fair Guide 2002, 1) – a possible survival strategy, and an avenue for the development of the larger Roma community: ‘Furthermore, the utilitarian character of these crafts could undergo a shift, in the sense of acquiring an artistic character endowed with an ethnic marker, and thus become a form of reassessment of Roma cultural heritage and an affirmation of Roma identity’ (Roma Fair Guide, 2002, 2). The brochure listed the following occupations, with illustrations: blacksmiths, coppersmiths (Kelderara), silver- and goldsmiths, welders, woodcarvers (Rudara), brick makers, tanners, comb makers, brush makers, bear handlers, horse traders (Lovara), fiddlers and magicians. The fair itself featured coppersmiths, silversmiths, woodcarvers, magicians and fiddlers.
I asked one of the woodcarvers about his occupation and showed him the brochure. He told me that he