Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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of citizenship to Romanian ethnicity. However, I focus here on the transformative potential of counterpublics, conveyed by Michael Warner’s definition, as ‘spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely’ (Warner 2002, 88). Viewed in this way, Roma counterpublics, which resist the citizenship gap and challenge the hegemony of ethnic nationalism,12 have the potential to include non-Roma and Roma alike. Through performances analysed in this book, Roma articulate belonging to Romania, imagining Romania as a pluralistic, diverse nation and proposing alternative views of citizenship that do not equate the nation with an ethnic group. While I identify these counterpublics as Roma, non-Roma may share the same views, just as the hegemonic public can be both non-Roma and Roma. For example, in the reality show Clejanii, Viorica identifies herself as a hard-working woman who does not conform to commercially promoted standards of feminine beauty that objectify women. She appeals to a counterpublic who understand and appreciate the labour behind her successful musical performances as a Roma artist.
Another example of performance of citizenship addressing a Roma counterpublic is the August 2010 edition of the television programme Roma Caravan, dedicated to the expulsions of Roma from France. In this programme, Daniel Vasile, vice-president of the Roma Party for Europe, and George Răducanu, Roma activist, accused both French and Romanian governments of racism and criticized the treatment of Roma Romanian citizens as second-class citizens. They spoke to a Roma counterpublic and pointed out that the forceful expulsions and evictions of Roma in France and Romania, respectively, reflected the French and Romanian governments’ similar attitudes towards Roma. This was one of the rare instances where unequivocal criticism of the expulsions was broadcast on Romanian television and media in general.
The Citizenship Gap in Pod: Basic Citizenship Rights and Cultural Citizenship
Pod, the settlement near the refuse site where I conducted ethnographic research with poor Roma, represents the materialization of the gap between legal and actual citizenship: the space, erased from official maps, where Roma with legal Romanian citizenship are de facto non-citizens and experience a complete failure of their citizenship rights. I see the spatial reality of the citizenship gap as a variation of Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) camp. The camp, according to Agamben, is where refugees live as non-citizens, a place for zoe or ‘bare life.’ From the state’s point of view, Pod has been reduced to a gap; however, my ethnographic research brings into focus the subjectivities of Pod’s inhabitants – not unlike Sigona (2015), who uses the term ‘campenization’ to discuss the status of Roma living in camps in Italy (see also Sigona and Trehan 2009; Hepworth 2015).
This book shows how neoliberal economic policies – including large cuts in social security, the disappearance of low-skilled jobs and work opportunities for Roma, and evictions from formerly nationalized properties that were returned to their owners after 1989 – have disproportionately affected Roma. I discuss everyday experiences of the citizenship gap for Roma from Pod, such as the enrolment of Roma children in a school for children with learning disabilities, and mistreatment by the police; I also discuss how Roma in Pod have resisted the citizenship gap through dance performances and their own claims to belong in Romania. Pod and other similar places, contrary to media representations, are connected to Romanian society through a series of informal networks of relatives, acquaintances and new arrivals. Pod residents express these affective ties to Romania when they speak of ‘our country, Romania’, ‘our politicians’ and ‘our language’, the latter sometimes being Romani and sometimes Romanian. Their views on belonging echo those expressed by prominent Roma activists, whose strategies in the media and cultural events aim to raise public awareness about Roma history and Roma contributions to culture and society.
Using ethnographic evidence from Pod and elsewhere, I show that Roma continue to be racialized on the basis of external markers, a process that perpetuates the citizenship gap for Roma.13 Throughout this book, I treat Roma as an ethnicity, as no immutable signs mark one as Ţigan/Ţigancă or Roma, despite widespread misconceptions that all Roma are dark skinned, for example.14 I also focus on racialization processes: while ‘race’ as a classificatory term is a social construction which masquerades as truth and uses biology to do so, it is an important term that captures the reality of racism, which Roma continue to experience. Through performative processes of gendered and classed racialization and misrecognition, Roma fail to access actual citizenship, either materially or symbolically. Roma who are unmarked may pass as the majority, their Roma ethnicity erased, while Roma values are appropriated by the ethnic nation;15 others fail to pass – for example, Roma in Pod are classified as abject Ţigani, while Roma musicians and performers are seen as exotic Ţigani. Paraphrasing Stuart Hall (1980), I argue that poor Roma in Romania experience their class as race and are racialized into Ţigani.16 Some Roma are able to escape the racialization of poverty in some contexts but not in others (see Emigh and Szelényi 2000; Stewart 2002; Ladányi and Szelényi 2006).17 I show the limits of the relative fluidity in the racialization of Roma; and I argue that the markers of class can include an association with a specific location, such as Pod, in addition to external markers of low socioeconomic status, such as clothing and overall appearance or darker skin tone.
‘Roma Culture’ Clashes: The State, the EU and Roma NGOs
The Romanian government’s ten-year National Strategy for Improving the Situation of Roma (NSISR), 2001–2010, funded in large part by the EU,18 failed to acknowledge that Roma were first and foremost Romanian citizens.19 The NSISR was a public policy document focused on several guiding principles, including decentralization, consensus, equality and identity differentiation. It prioritized ten development directions: community development and public administration, housing, social security, healthcare, justice and public order, child protection, education, culture and religion, communication, and civic participation.20 The official recognition of the Roma minority did not lead to legislative power for Roma, unlike for other ethnonational minorities in Romania. In 2010 there was one Roma politician from the Roma Party for Europe in the Romanian parliament, representing up to two million Roma21 in Romania, while a similarly sized Hungarian minority had twenty-two members of parliament in the Hungarians’ Democratic Union Party.22
This citizenship gap has been maintained through the historical appropriation and erasure of Roma culture, which in Romania has resulted in the perception of the Roma as cultureless (a situation exacerbated by the former socialist regime’s complete denial of Roma as an ethnocultural minority). Despite official recognition of Roma culture, in post-socialist Romania Roma are seen as both uncultured – individually and collectively – and lacking folklore (a proper tradition) or high culture.23 On the one hand, the Romanian state recognizes Roma ethnoculture, but on the other it does not provide Roma with the kinds of ethnocultural institutions that support ethnic minorities of a similar size. For example, national minorities such as Hungarian and German Romanians enjoy state-sponsored ethnocultural institutions, including schools and theatres. There are no state-sponsored ethnocultural institutions for Roma in Romania, with the exception of the National Agency for Roma (the most recent iteration of the only government institution explicitly charged with coordinating public policies for Roma, which was founded in 2004) and the recently opened Museum of