Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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among Roma living in or touring cities in Romania and Western Europe, this study is the first to address at length the perspective of the urban and rural impoverished Roma who are part of the mass exodus to the margins of society, in places like Pod.7 This book discusses ethnoculture in relation to political economy, gender and history. It engages with disenfranchised urban Roma – most of them with part-time careers as amateur dancers or musicians – in the squat settlement of Pod, Transylvania, and with Roma artists, intellectuals and activists; it also discusses concerts, fairs, cultural performances and activist training sessions. Staging Citizenship explores the proliferation of a wide range of Roma performances and representations, from live music to TV soaps and reality shows, and the rise of Roma activism in the post-socialist period, examining the citizenship gap that all these different Roma experience to different degrees.
Market expansion to the east, in the context of EU enlargement, and the corresponding import of civil society and democracy, including a focus on the Roma minority, have led to the recent ubiquity of Roma music and dance performances, both in the West and in Romania. The figure of the passionate Gypsy has become one of the latest sources of exoticism in the West. Marketed as timeless and exotic, Roma bands from Romania and other Balkan countries feature in international festivals; DJs play ‘Gypsy music’; Gypsy dress parties have spread, from London and Paris to New York and Houston. In Romania, Roma dance and music groups have proliferated, while new TV soaps about Roma (acted by non-Roma) and reality shows featuring famous Roma musicians (such as Clejanii, featuring Viorica) have become increasingly popular. However, the visibility of Roma music and dance performance has not translated into Roma being recognized as citizens, despite the fact that Roma express cultural citizenship through these media.
This book uses performance to theorize the racialization of Roma, which leads to their misrecognition in everyday life, onstage and in media representations. At the same time, I show how Roma claim a form of cultural citizenship through these media, which goes unrecognized in official and mainstream understandings of citizenship. The book traces how divergent or parallel definitions of ‘culture’ – from the Romanian state’s definition of national culture in exclusively ethnic terms, to the authenticity criteria promulgated in EU definitions of Roma culture, to the commodified versions of culture promoted in commercial media – constitute the grounds upon which Roma continue to be denied full citizenship, cultural and otherwise. The absence of Roma from Romanian theatre is one illustration of how Roma have been excluded from the institutionalized, state-supported version of national culture. If national theatre is a reflection of the nation as imagined by its cultural producers, playwrights and so on, Roma – who have been made invisible in theatre – have instead populated other performance spaces, especially music spaces, and have become symbols of the nation while being denied their own culture. Taking its cue from performance studies scholarship on citizenship (Joseph 1999; Shimakawa 2002; Nield 2006; Roxworthy 2008; Kim 2014), on Travellers (Wickstrom 2012), and on performance ethnography (Conquergood 2002; Madison 2005, 2011; Johnson 2003) and work in Romani studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology and media studies (Lemon 2000; Beissinger 2007; Silverman 2007 2012; Imre 2009, Seeman forthcoming), this book uses performance to analyse Roma cultural production across the genres where Roma have become most visible: in music, dance and television in relation to the citizenship gap. I also analyse the representations of Roma in these media – which are usually commercial and controlled by non-Roma – in relation to the performative aspects of the racialization of Roma in everyday life.8 I situate these performances, in the wider structural constraints, both socio-economic and discursive/policy-related, and show how they confirm or challenge the citizenship gap. Performance, understood as “making, not faking”,9 in its multiplicity of occurrences—from everyday life to the stage and screen—represents a privileged lens into exploring the citizenship gap for Roma as a process, and it also brings into focus the limitations and radical potential of the new visibility of Roma artists and artefacts.
Through this book I argue that Roma in Romania are jettisoned as ‘not us’, a gesture that maintains the citizenship gap at the social and discursive levels for Roma, and the privilege of the majority through monoethnic paradigms of nation and citizenship. This jettisoning is also evident in the cultural representations and racialized hierarchies that assign low- and popular-culture roles to Roma artists and performers while maintaining their status as Other. I analyse the representations of Roma promoted through official state recognition and commercial media in relation to Romania’s dominant racial, gendered and cultural hierarchies framed by monoethnic nationalism.10 I present a diversity of Roma voices and performances, some of which have become more prominent, such as those of Roma activists, politicians and artists, while others have been overlooked, including the voices and performances of impoverished Roma, which I see as alternative performances of citizenship that resist dominant racial hierarchies and the citizenship gap for Roma.
In the rest of this introduction I provide a detailed description of the main threads of the book’s argument, followed by a brief overview of the history of the Roma in Romania and wider region, a discussion of the book’s methodology, and a chapter outline.
Performance and the Citizenship Gap
In this book I focus on performances by and about Roma – in the media, onstage, in schools and at international and local festivals – in relation to the citizenship gap and to symbolic and tacit understandings of who is included in the nation and the collective ‘we’. I show how these representations influence the perception and racialization of Roma among non-Roma, including in everyday encounters, cultural events, and social programmes organized by state institutions and NGOs. I examine the citizenship gap in the everyday lives of Pod residents, and the ways they resist that citizenship gap through dance and performance, which I analyse as expressions of cultural citizenship. I draw out the tensions between the state’s definitions and recognition of the Roma on the one hand, and Roma activists and NGOs who resist or inadvertently accept the citizenship gap on the other. I analyse: the newly successful Romanian television soaps Gypsy Heart (Inimă de Ţigan), The Queen (Regina) and State of Romania (State de România), in which non-Roma actors play Roma characters; reality shows on Romanian television, such as Clejanii, which features famous Roma musicians; and music and dance performances, including manele, a controversial and extremely popular music genre played almost exclusively by Roma musicians in Romania. I also discuss internationally acclaimed Roma artists and young amateur performers in Pod, the very few television programmes by Roma in Romania (such as the weekly programme Roma Caravan – Caravana Romilor) and the presence of Roma activists on mainstream Romanian talk shows and television programmes.
This book analyses performances as expressions of belonging and cultural citizenship for Roma, transmitted across generations through what Diana Taylor (2003) calls the ‘repertoire’, and absent from institutionalized forms of culture in Romania. At the same time, the association between Roma and performance, especially music performance, has been a staple of perceptions and stereotypes of Roma (Okely 1983; Stewart 1997; Lemon 2000a; Silverman 2012). For centuries, Roma musicians in Russia and the countries of East Central Europe were considered mere vehicles of the genius of those nations, and as lacking a culture of their own. Roma were excluded from national culture and folklore in Romania, and Roma musicians’ contribution was seen to be merely the transmission of Romanian folklore. The visibility of Roma as the exotic Other onstage and in works of literature and art by non-Roma was accompanied by constant monitoring and repression by the police and authorities across centuries.
The current visibility of Roma onstage and in the media relies upon the recycling of lucrative old stereotypes about Roma (see Silverman 2012; Imre 2009; Imre and Tremlett 2011) and, at the same time, I argue, it creates a Roma counterpublic. Like Trehan (2009), I see the Roma counterpublic as subaltern, following Nancy Fraser (1992)11: