Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman
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Название: Staging Citizenship

Автор: Ioana Szeman

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: История

Серия: Dance and Performance Studies

isbn: 9781785337314

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      Roma are always the last to count, but we won first prize. We would not settle for second or third place.

      —Maria, Roma dancer, interview with the author, 2009

      I’ve worked hard. When you look at me, you can see that I’ve succeeded through my voice, not my looks.

      —Viorica, Roma singer, Romanian reality TV show Clejanii, December 2012

      Moderator: Why is there tension between Roma and Romanians?

      Roma activist: First of all, you should not use these terms; you should speak of Roma and non-Roma, as all Roma [in Romania] are Romanian citizens.

      —Talk show on Romanian national TV channel Realitatea, December 2007

      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.