television soaps Gypsy Heart (Inimă de Ţigan), The Queen (Regina) and State of Romania (State de România), in which non-Roma actors play Roma characters; reality shows on Romanian television, such as Clejanii, which features famous Roma musicians; and music and dance performances, including manele, a controversial and extremely popular music genre played almost exclusively by Roma musicians in Romania. I also discuss internationally acclaimed Roma artists and young amateur performers in Pod, the very few television programmes by Roma in Romania (such as the weekly programme Roma Caravan – Caravana Romilor) and the presence of Roma activists on mainstream Romanian talk shows and television programmes.
This book analyses performances as expressions of belonging and cultural citizenship for Roma, transmitted across generations through what Diana Taylor (2003) calls the ‘repertoire’, and absent from institutionalized forms of culture in Romania. At the same time, the association between Roma and performance, especially music performance, has been a staple of perceptions and stereotypes of Roma (Okely 1983; Stewart 1997; Lemon 2000a; Silverman 2012). For centuries, Roma musicians in Russia and the countries of East Central Europe were considered mere vehicles of the genius of those nations, and as lacking a culture of their own. Roma were excluded from national culture and folklore in Romania, and Roma musicians’ contribution was seen to be merely the transmission of Romanian folklore. The visibility of Roma as the exotic Other onstage and in works of literature and art by non-Roma was accompanied by constant monitoring and repression by the police and authorities across centuries.
The current visibility of Roma onstage and in the media relies upon the recycling of lucrative old stereotypes about Roma (see Silverman 2012; Imre 2009; Imre and Tremlett 2011) and, at the same time, I argue, it creates a Roma counterpublic. Like Trehan (2009), I see the Roma counterpublic as subaltern, following Nancy Fraser (1992)11: the Roma counterpublic’s existence is denied by the state’s equation 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.
