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 research, discussing the representations of Roma by non-Roma in the hugely successful television soaps Gypsy Heart, The Queen and State of Romania, and in talk shows and debates on current affairs programmes. It analyses Roma performances of citizenship in the media and their reception among different Roma.
6. The Ambivalence of Success: Roma Musicians and the Citizenship Gap
Focusing on musical performances as performances of citizenship, Chapter 6 discusses Roma musicians and their success in relation to the citizenship gap for Roma. The chapter discusses manele singer Florin Salam’s unsuccessful attempt to represent Romania at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2010, and Viorica and Ioniţă’s performances on the reality show Clejanii, in relation to both the citizenship gap and Roma counterpublics.
Conclusion: Unlearning the Forgetting
The conclusion discusses Hungarian Roma artist Tibor Balogh’s performance installation ‘Rain of Tears’ as a metaphor for the work that states and individuals alike need to undertake in order to close the citizenship gap for Roma.
Notes
1. All translations from the Romanian are mine, unless otherwise noted. I use the terms Rom (masculine singular), Roma (masculine plural), Romni (feminine singular) and Romnja (feminine plural) to describe individuals from this ethnic minority, and I also employ Roma as an adjective. I use Gypsy when discussing stereotypes in and from the West; Gypsy is also the term with which Roma in the United Kingdom identify, and does not necessarily denote a stereotype (Okely 1983). I use the nouns Ţigan (masculine singular), Ţiganca (feminine singular), Ţigani (masculine plural), Ţigănci (feminine plural) and the adjectival form Ţigan to describe local stereotypes and the way some Roma in Romania identify.
2. ‘Pod’ is a fictitious name I use to protect the anonymity of this community. ‘Pod’ means bridge in Romanian. In addition to using pseudonyms for people, in several instances I have created composite identities.
3. See Delanty (1997) for one of the first articulations of the difference between legal and actual citizenship.
4. While a large number of Roma live in poverty, all Roma experience the citizenship gap at the level of cultural citizenship, and this has real, material consequences in their everyday lives.
5. Discrimination against Roma children in schools is still common across East Central Europe (ERRC 2004). The European Court of Human Rights ruled that there was discrimination against Roma children in the Czech Republic. In 2007, a year after an initial referral to the Grand Chamber of that court, the court found that ‘the practice of racial segregation in education violated Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination, taken together with Article 2 of Protocol 1, which secures the right to education’. The court noted that ‘the Czech Republic is not alone in this practice and that discriminatory barriers to education for Roma children are present in a number of European countries’ (ERRC 2007).
6. In the summer of 2010 the French government initiated a virulent expulsion campaign that targeted over 300 settlements on the outskirts of cities, with thousands of Roma migrants forced to return to Romania or Bulgaria.
7. See Enikő Magyari-Vincze, 2007, who engages with Roma in similar situations.
8. Performance studies scholarship that has paved the way for a critical investigation of citizenship through a performance lens includes: May Joseph (1999) on the performative links between legal and cultural citizenship; Karen Shimakawa (2002) on Asian–American identity; Sophie Nield on performances of citizenship at the border (2006); Emily Roxworthy (2008) on the performative logic of citizenship in the United States;, and Suk-Young Kim (2014) on the affective aspects of citizenship in the DMZ between North and South Korea.
9. This phrase was coined by anthropologist Victor Turner (1982, 93); Richard Schechner defines performance as ‘restored behavior’ or ‘twice-behaved behavior’ (2013), while Dwight Conquergood discusses performance as kinesis (making) in relation to minority cultures and subjugated knowledge (2002).
10. The terms used for the majority ethnicity (Romanian)
