Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 2, there was no shortage of such incidents: encounters in hospitals, schools, shops and police stations, and often with state employees, demonstrated this everyday racism.
In many instances my ethnographic journey involved making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Performance and theatre scholar Baz Kershaw discusses radical theatre, which has the power to change the ideological inclination and worldviews of audiences: ‘theatre which mounts a radical attack on the status quo may prove deceptive. The slow burning fuse of efficacy may be invisible’ (1992, 28). I see the slow burning fuse metaphor as an apt description of the change in subjectivity that I experienced when making the strange familiar and vice versa. The slow burning fuse was started for me most likely at a Christmas celebration in Pod, when I visited with non-Roma friends. In these moments, when I was allowed into people’s lives, the expected power balance was temporarily redressed; instead of only witnessing suffering and injustice, I spent enjoyable moments with Pod friends. These became turning points in the co-witnessing process of ethnography, when the initial impulse, of seeing Pod as a problem that needed a solution, receded to some extent. I started listening to people more carefully, to their music, their dances and their actions. My sense of outrage at their situation never disappeared, but it became equally important for me to document their other stories – in addition to stories about injustice and discrimination – from the way they saw Gypsy soaps to their perspectives on belonging in Romania.
From Pod, this study moves to other places within Romania, including Bucharest, and then abroad to the West, following the trajectory of ‘Gypsy music’. In addition to Pod, I conducted fieldwork in Bucharest and in Clejani, the village in southern Romania from where the famous (in the West) Roma band Taraf de Haïdouks originate. In London I experienced first hand the considerable international success of ‘Gypsy music’: from traditional music to the ubiquitous manele,33 everything had become prime material for mixing into dance music in venues such as the Barbican and clubs such as Koko and Cargo. I attended concerts at these venues, as well as other cultural events. I attended many performances of the dance group Together, composed of both young Roma and gadge, which initially started at a local school near Pod. My travels across Romania took me to different parts of the country, where I interacted with different Roma: Romungre, Gabors (traders and welders), Kelderara, Karamidarja and Vatrash, Lăutari, Ursara, Kelderara and Rudara, as well as activists and intellectuals.
The ethnographic material in this book focuses mainly on Roma from Transylvania and Wallachia, regions within Romania’s national borders. The distinct histories and social status of different Roma, including musicians, in Transylvania and Wallachia influence current perceptions of these musicians and the different stereotypes associated with them. Roma known as Romungre were historically Hungarian speaking, and had musical occupations during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I met some Romungre in Pod, most of whom only spoke Romanian. Roma musicians in Wallachia were known as Lăutari; I met some Lăutari in Clejani. The repertoire and audiences of Romungre and Lăutari musicians diverged with the music and histories of Austro-Hungary and Romania respectively, until 1918, when Transylvania became part of Greater Romania. Transylvanian music and Romungre musicians were ‘rediscovered’ by the Tanchaz movement as Hungarian folk music in the 1970s. From socialism to post-socialism, Transylvania remained the repository of folk music for Hungarian musicologists and nationalists alike. Muzica lăutărească – the music of the Lăutari in Wallachia – had strong Turkish influences, evident today in manele, the most popular genre, played predominantly by Roma musicians in Wallachia. Today manele production is most powerful in Bucharest, and the concentration of media production and political power in the city has made certain groups of Roma, especially those in and around Bucharest, more visible in the national arena. The media brought to Pod the sounds and sights of manele from Bucharest, and Roma in Pod enjoyed, consumed and performed manele and a traditional Roma dance known locally as csingeralas, a type of verbunk, part of the Tanchaz music. However, ‘manelists’ are most numerous in the south of Romania, and manele are equally popular in Transylvania.
Despite the diversity that characterizes both Roma and their musical production, and despite their significant musical success, this book shows that Roma have not gained a legitimate place as a culture in the national imaginary, and they continue to be denied cultural citizenship, even when their music is praised. While Roma musicians’ performances may continue lucrative stereotypes about Roma that have existed for centuries, from the perspective of a Roma counterpublic, these performances can be read as performances of citizenship. As the advent of neoliberalism under monoethnic nationalism has maintained the citizenship gap for Roma, paying attention to the subjectivities of Roma and including them as equal partners in social and cultural programmes could be a first step for state institutions to take in bridging this gap.
Chapter Outline
Part I: Poor Roma, Roma Activists and the Romanian State
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the lived structural constraints within which everyday performances of citizenship are enacted, while Chapter 3 addresses the discursive constraints of policy framings on the performances of citizenship for Roma.
1. ‘We Will Build a Beautiful Future Together’: NGO Historiography, Roma Culture and Monoethnic Nationalism
Focusing on Roma activists’ work at a 2002 Roma fair and cultural festival in Bucharest, the chapter shows that cultural events’ outreach was limited by the Romanian state’s hegemonic constructions of the nation and of citizenship, and as a result these events became venues for the consumption of ethnic artefacts.
2. Living in the Citizenship Gap: Roma and the Permanent State of Emergency in Pod
Chapter 2 is an ethnography of the impoverished urban Roma community of Pod, and focuses on the complete citizenship gap that Roma in Pod experienced. The chapter uses a performance lens to discuss the collective and individual experiences of the citizenship gap in Pod, including discrimination and abuse, and everyday experiences of racism. The chapter demonstrates how the diversity of Pod residents’ cultural practices belie Romanian media’s images of sameness among the Roma and stereotypes that poor Roma, or Ţigani, lacked culture.
3. ‘Too Poor to Have Culture’: The Post-Socialist Politics of Authenticity in Roma NGO Training
Through an ethnographic account and performative analysis of a training workshop for Roma activists, this chapter shows that programmes promoting Roma development in Romania inadvertently reproduce the stereotypical Ţigani and the citizenship gap for Roma. EU-sponsored social programmes for Roma exclude the most impoverished, while claiming to aim to improve the situation of Roma.
Part II: Roma Performance and the Citizenship Gap: From Exoticism to Creative Resistance
Chapters 4 through 6 bring material, structural and discursive constraints directly into conversation with a range of settings and practices, from media to the stage, in which performances of citizenship take place.
4. Performing Bollywood: Young Roma Dance Cultural Citizenship
Chapter 4 focuses on a student dance group, Together, comprised of young Roma from Pod and non-Roma, who perform at festivals and schools in Transylvania and abroad. Many Roma students continue to be discriminated against in schools that boast multicultural policies and for the young Roma in this group, dance was one of their few avenues of success.
5. Consuming Exoticism/Reimagining Citizenship: Romanian Nationalism and Roma Counterpublics on Romanian Television
Chapter 5 combines media analysis and ethnographic