Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman

Staging Citizenship - Ioana Szeman


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money they made from scavenging on the refuse site. She had been a member of a Roma dance group that was formed and active during the first post-socialist decade; she showed me her dance costumes, which included long, colourful skirts, scarves decorated with coins, and high-heeled shoes. Sitting in her spotlessly clean living room, Maria, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, proudly reminisced about her dance group’s success in competitions: ‘When they heard that we were coming, they were surprised, and the last ones to come ended up winning first prize. Roma are always the last to count, but we won first prize. We would not settle for second or third place.’ She told me that even though sometimes they were looked at with suspicion because they were Roma, their performances always earned them praise.

      At the opposite end of the social spectrum, Viorica, a famous Roma singer from the band Taraful din Clejani, explains that her successful musical career is the result of hard work, not looks. With her musician partner and two children, Viorica featured on Clejanii, a reality show on Romanian television portraying their daily life. The quotation in the epigraph is from the third episode, in which she and her daughter Margherita pay a visit to a designer. When the designer offers Margherita a modelling job (a way for the designer to gain publicity through the reality show) and asks her to lose a little weight for the purpose, Viorica – blonde, slightly overweight and in her late thirties – tells her daughter: ‘Yes, make sure you do not end up like me. Once you’ve gained weight, it’s hard to lose it.’ Then she turns to the camera: ‘Thank God I did not make my living that way. I succeeded through hard work, through my voice.’ Viorica expresses her relief at being successful because of her musical abilities when most female artists in Romania are evaluated for their image and appeal as sex objects. She is one of very few female Roma musicians to have enjoyed success in a field where Roma men reign. And yet, despite their success and prosperity, famous Roma musicians such as Viorica are not considered part of the nation in Romania; indeed the reality show trod a fine line between admiration and mockery of Viorica and her family.

      The final quotation in the epigraph is from a discussion between a non-Roma moderator and a Roma activist during a 2007 talk show on Romanian national television. The moderator refused to refer to Roma as Romanian citizens, even though most Roma in Romania have Romanian citizenship. Two Roma activists – a man and a woman – were the only Roma on this talk show, which focused on the question ‘why is there tension between Roma and Romanians?’ and featured five other guests. The moderator, a non-Roma woman, did not seem to understand why the activists were insisting that Roma were Romanian citizens, and she proceeded to call them ‘Ţigani’ even after the activists had told her that the term was not acceptable and she should use ‘Roma’ instead.

      Indeed, this book shows that Roma are denied cultural citizenship not only in Romania, but also in most other European countries; and, at the same time, many of them suffer discrimination and abuses of their basic rights. I argue that policies and social programmes for Roma need to be linked to interventions in the official and symbolic definitions of citizenship, which are not captured by a focus on legal citizenship or poverty alone. This book intervenes in current debates on Roma and citizenship in Europe (see Sigona and Trehan 2009; van Baar 2011; Sigona 2015; Hepworth 2015) by introducing (the lack of) cultural citizenship as a key concept for understanding the lack of access to citizenship for Roma.


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