Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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I define Romania’s state-sponsored multiculturalism as normative monoethnic performativity, which includes the cohabitation of separate, non-intersecting ethnocultures, as illustrated by the Hungarian minority’s successful lobbying for an autonomous education system (see Vincze 2011). The dominant essentialist understandings of identity create a system of non-intersecting cultures and parallel worldviews modelled on monoethnic nationalism and favouring ethnocultures that are also nationalities, such as Hungarian or German; this system continues to appropriate and erase Roma culture, failing to treat Roma culture as equal to other ethnocultures. One becomes Romanian or Hungarian by attending monoethnically denominated Romanian or Hungarian schools and dance ensembles, whereas Roma children from Pod, for example, continue to be stigmatized, and many attend special schools for students with learning disabilities.
During post-socialism Roma culture has resurfaced as a paradigm for Roma ethnicity, but not through public cultural policies. Instead, Roma culture has become visible in commercial and NGO representations, and neoliberal approaches to culture have converged with nationalism and xenophobia in the commodification of identifiable Roma cultural aspects that do not challenge nationalist paradigms.25 The official recognition of Roma culture has thus become a mechanism of exclusion based on authenticity criteria that pigeonhole Roma into stereotypical images.
Current policies for Roma have promoted narrow definitions of culture that exclude the most impoverished. Cultural and social programmes for and about Roma focus on what makes Roma stand out from the majority: traditional occupations such a tin making, spoon making and playing music. For example, the 2002 Roma Fair held outside the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, in Bucharest, featured Roma demonstrating a range of traditional occupations, few of which are practised today. Such exotic images of Roma tradition and ahistorical cultural paradigms directly influence who is recognized as Roma under EU-guided neoliberal social policies. Official definitions of Roma communities, such as those used in EU programmes for social change among Roma, conceive of Roma in these terms, failing to take into account the current lives of most Roma, including the poorest. Poor Roma in Pod, for example, express and take pride in Roma culture, despite not fitting into officially sanctioned definitions of authentic Roma crafts, occupations or attire.
Social programmes sponsored by the EU and NGOs function as spaces of misrecognition for many poor Roma, and recycle Ţigani stereotypes: Roma are recognized by the state as activists if they possess the high culture Roma are supposed to lack, and if they can fashion themselves into self-sustaining individuals showing self-reliance.26 Paradoxically, even as they recycle underclass stereotypes, social programmes for Roma are training activists in ‘civility’.27 The process of NGO training has turned activists into neoliberal subjects and cast some Roma, like those in Pod, as inauthentic. Obliged to operate within paradigms that equate Roma culture with tradition and authenticity, Roma activists are called upon by the state to demonstrate their own modernity by casting ‘authentic’ Roma as timeless and traditional and distinguishing them from the undeserving poor. In this way, poor Roma have been constructed as the abject Other, while exotic Roma have gained a new popularity that sits easily next to existing stereotypes.
In order to close the citizenship gap for Roma, monoethnic national paradigms, cultural policies and the official writing of national history need to be changed to include them. While I show that NGOs often contribute to maintaining the status quo of monoethnic performativity, the mushrooming of Roma NGOs – which Trehan defines as the ‘NGO-ization of Roma rights’ (2009, 56) – allows possibilities, albeit limited ones, for a critique and redefinition of citizenship. I use the term ‘NGO historiography’ for the alternative historical narratives that have foregrounded Roma, challenged ethnic-based definitions of Romanian citizenship and have been produced or disseminated through NGO events, institutions and initiatives. NGO historiography has to compete with the hegemony of the monoethnic nationalism promoted and supported by state institutions. It produces narratives that function as minor histories28 (Stoler 2009) that challenge and cut across simplistic, victimized versions of the nation; national histories in the region have emphasized the negative effects of powerful empires and the annexation of national territories. I analyse the work of Roma activists under the constraints of neoliberalism and nationalism, and document their attempts to change hegemonic national paradigms to include Roma, regardless of class, gender or occupation, in definitions of citizenship and national history.
Roma in Romanian and European History: Stereotypes and Erasures
A nation-state since 1918, Romania has been home to numerous ethnic minorities. The appropriation and erasure of Roma culture has historical roots in definitions of the Romanian nation and in larger geopolitical realities; in the same way, today, the situation of the Roma in Romania can only be understood in relation to the wider EU context. While the Romanian nation has always been marginal in relation to the West, Roma within Romania, as a non-territorial, disenfranchised ethnic minority, have symbolically threatened national identities through abjection.29 Romanian nationalism was modelled on Western Europe, and ‘the West’ continues to be an integral component of every discussion and definition of Romanian national identity. The Othering of Ţigani – reflected in ongoing racism and the racialization of poverty in Romania – echoes Romania’s subaltern position in relation to Western Europe: the Romanian nation is ‘not quite European’ and is in danger of contagion, of becoming like its abject Other, the Ţigani. At work here are nesting relationships of marginality, with the Romanian nation being marginal in relation to the West, and the Roma threatening national identity through abjection.30
Today, non-Roma mainly learn about Roma through media representations, TV soaps and music, and all of these are for the most part controlled by non-Roma. Ian Hancock (1987), a prominent Roma scholar, points out that when other nations are portrayed as stereotypes, the school curriculum provides the necessary information to help students distinguish between fact and fiction. However, there is widespread amnesia about the past with regard to Roma, and very little information about Roma on mainstream school curricula, either in Romania or beyond. Artworks and fictional representations by non-Roma have for a long time been the only sources of information about Roma available to the public at large. Non-Roma works featuring stereotypical representations have created a whole field of signifiers similar to Orientalism, defined as stereotypical representations of Asia and the Middle East in the West (Said [1978] 1994; see Lemon 2000). These stereotypes continue to be quoted, recycled and perpetuated, to the extent that Roma use and quote them themselves.
Literary critic Katie Trumpener (1992) has eloquently argued that in Western literature, Gypsies function as triggers of memory and nostalgia, as a people without history, and as memory keepers for other nations. Other scholars have shown that ‘literary Gypsies throughout Europe figure nationalist nostalgia – they are envisioned as a kind of time capsule for storing national forms (music, folklore, traditions) and a simpler past’ (Lemon 2000a, 41). Trumpener argues that the mythologization of Gypsies as timeless preservers of the past is ambiguous, as it veils their marginalization in forgetfulness: ‘The function of nostalgia is to restore innocence, by covering up other memories, harsher realities of tension and hostility and fear’ (Trumpener 1992, 853). Gypsies have played this role in literary works from Mérimée’s novella Carmen to Virginia Woolf’s novel Three Guineas. Given how little known Roma are as a people with a history beyond the stereotypes, in this section I provide an overview of Roma history in relation to Roma representations in the arts.
It is not widely known in Romania or elsewhere that Roma – the self-ascription of most individuals using the Romani language, and of other groups identifying as Ţigani, Rudara, Sinti and so on