for the status of refugee and migrant Roma in Italy, while van Baar (2017) proposes the concept of evictability to underline the internal biopolitical border within Europe. At the same time that Romanian Roma, who were EU citizens, were being expelled from Western Europe, impoverished Roma in Pod were literally and metaphorically being pushed to the margins of Romanian society through evictions, poverty and joblessness. I show how the precarious status of migrant Roma in the EU is predicated on the citizenship gap they experience in their countries. In Romania these expulsions failed to cause widespread outrage, as most non-Roma did not identify with those who were being expelled; media coverage condemned the migrants rather than the expulsions, reinforcing the citizenship gap for Roma. Furthermore, the Romanian government collaborated with its French counterpart in the repatriation process. There was widespread frustration in Romania at perceived anti-Romanian sentiments in France in the aftermath of the expulsions, and members of Romanian parliament proposed to replace the name of the ethnicity ‘Roma’ with ‘Ţigani’, supposedly to avoid further conflation between Roma and Romanians – as if Romanian Roma were not Romanian citizens. Such instances reveal the lived reality of the citizenship gap for Roma on the one hand, and the symbolic and actual reinforcement of this gap by many non-Roma, including politicians and state employees, on the other.
Staging Citizenship shows that the citizenship gap for Roma has persisted because official recognition has not granted Roma the same status as other, ‘legitimate’ minorities in Romania. I argue that the Romanian state has not changed its hegemonic definitions – which equate citizenship with ethnic Romanians and draw on ethnicity-based paradigms of citizenship, national culture and history – and has thus maintained the citizenship gap for Roma. In this book I use performance paradigms and examine how different Roma have negotiated and resisted the citizenship gap and claimed citizenship and belonging through music, dance, activism and everyday encounters. Drawing on more than a decade (2001–2012) of ethnographic research among Roma living in or touring cities in Romania and Western Europe, this study is the first to address at length the perspective of the urban and rural impoverished Roma who are part of the mass exodus to the margins of society, in places like Pod.7 This book discusses ethnoculture in relation to political economy, gender and history. It engages with disenfranchised urban Roma – most of them with part-time careers as amateur dancers or musicians – in the squat settlement of Pod, Transylvania, and with Roma artists, intellectuals and activists; it also discusses concerts, fairs, cultural performances and activist training sessions. Staging Citizenship explores the proliferation of a wide range of Roma performances and representations, from live music to TV soaps and reality shows, and the rise of Roma activism in the post-socialist period, examining the citizenship gap that all these different Roma experience to different degrees.
Market expansion to the east, in the context of EU enlargement, and the corresponding import of civil society and democracy, including a focus on the Roma minority, have led to the recent ubiquity of Roma music and dance performances, both in the West and in Romania. The figure of the passionate Gypsy has become one of the latest sources of exoticism in the West. Marketed as timeless and exotic, Roma bands from Romania and other Balkan countries feature in international festivals; DJs play ‘Gypsy music’; Gypsy dress parties have spread, from London and Paris to New York and Houston. In Romania, Roma dance and music groups have proliferated, while new TV soaps about Roma (acted by non-Roma) and reality shows featuring famous Roma musicians (such as Clejanii, featuring Viorica) have become increasingly popular. However, the visibility of Roma music and dance performance has not translated into Roma being recognized as citizens, despite the fact that Roma express cultural citizenship through these media.
This book uses performance to theorize the racialization of Roma, which leads to their misrecognition in everyday life, onstage and in media representations. At the same time, I show how Roma claim a form of cultural citizenship through these media, which goes unrecognized in official and mainstream understandings of citizenship. The book traces how divergent or parallel definitions of ‘culture’ – from the Romanian state’s definition of national culture in exclusively ethnic terms, to the authenticity criteria promulgated in EU definitions of Roma culture, to the commodified versions of culture promoted in commercial media – constitute the grounds upon which Roma continue to be denied full citizenship, cultural and otherwise. The absence of Roma from Romanian theatre is one illustration of how Roma have been excluded from the institutionalized, state-supported version of national culture. If national theatre is a reflection of the nation as imagined by its cultural producers, playwrights and so on, Roma – who have been made invisible in theatre – have instead populated other performance spaces, especially music spaces, and have become symbols of the nation while being denied their own culture. Taking its cue from performance studies scholarship on citizenship (Joseph 1999; Shimakawa 2002; Nield 2006; Roxworthy 2008; Kim 2014), on Travellers (Wickstrom 2012), and on performance ethnography (Conquergood 2002; Madison 2005, 2011; Johnson 2003) and work in Romani studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology and media studies (Lemon 2000; Beissinger 2007; Silverman 2007 2012; Imre 2009, Seeman forthcoming), this book uses performance to analyse Roma cultural production across the genres where Roma have become most visible: in music, dance and television in relation to the citizenship gap. I also analyse the representations of Roma in these media – which are usually commercial and controlled by non-Roma – in relation to the performative aspects of the racialization of Roma in everyday life.8 I situate these performances, in the wider structural constraints, both socio-economic and discursive/policy-related, and show how they confirm or challenge the citizenship gap. Performance, understood as “making, not faking”,9 in its multiplicity of occurrences—from everyday life to the stage and screen—represents a privileged lens into exploring the citizenship gap for Roma as a process, and it also brings into focus the limitations and radical potential of the new visibility of Roma artists and artefacts.
Through this book I argue that Roma in Romania are jettisoned as ‘not us’, a gesture that maintains the citizenship gap at the social and discursive levels for Roma, and the privilege of the majority through monoethnic paradigms of nation and citizenship. This jettisoning is also evident in the cultural representations and racialized hierarchies that assign low- and popular-culture roles to Roma artists and performers while maintaining their status as Other. I analyse the representations of Roma promoted through official state recognition and commercial media in relation to Romania’s dominant racial, gendered and cultural hierarchies framed by monoethnic nationalism.10 I present a diversity of Roma voices and performances, some of which have become more prominent, such as those of Roma activists, politicians and artists, while others have been overlooked, including the voices and performances of impoverished Roma, which I see as alternative performances of citizenship that resist dominant racial hierarchies and the citizenship gap for Roma.
In the rest of this introduction I provide a detailed description of the main threads of the book’s argument, followed by a brief overview of the history of the Roma in Romania and wider region, a discussion of the book’s methodology, and a chapter outline.
Performance and the Citizenship Gap
In this book I focus on performances by and about Roma – in the media, onstage, in schools and at international and local festivals – in relation to the citizenship gap and to symbolic and tacit understandings of who is included in the nation and the collective ‘we’. I show how these representations influence the perception and racialization of Roma among non-Roma, including in everyday encounters, cultural events, and social programmes organized by state institutions and NGOs. I examine the citizenship gap in the everyday lives of Pod residents, and the ways they resist that citizenship gap through dance and performance, which I analyse as expressions of cultural citizenship. I draw out the tensions between the state’s definitions and recognition of the Roma on the one hand, and Roma activists and NGOs who resist or inadvertently
