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 The NSISR was a public policy document focused on several guiding principles, including decentralization, consensus, equality and identity differentiation. It prioritized ten development directions: community development and public administration, housing, social security, healthcare, justice and public order, child protection, education, culture and religion, communication, and civic participation.20 The official recognition of the Roma minority did not lead to legislative power for Roma, unlike for other ethnonational minorities in Romania. In 2010 there was one Roma politician from the Roma Party for Europe in the Romanian parliament, representing up to two million Roma21 in Romania, while a similarly sized Hungarian minority had twenty-two members of parliament in the Hungarians’ Democratic Union Party.22

      I define Romania’s state-sponsored multiculturalism as normative monoethnic performativity, which includes the cohabitation of separate, non-intersecting ethnocultures, as illustrated by the Hungarian minority’s successful lobbying for an autonomous education system (see Vincze 2011). The dominant essentialist understandings of identity create a system of non-intersecting cultures and parallel worldviews modelled on monoethnic nationalism and favouring ethnocultures that are also nationalities, such as Hungarian or German; this system continues to appropriate and erase Roma culture, failing to treat Roma culture as equal to other ethnocultures. One becomes Romanian or Hungarian by attending monoethnically denominated Romanian or Hungarian schools and dance ensembles, whereas Roma children from Pod, for example, continue to be stigmatized, and many attend special schools for students with learning disabilities.

      Current policies for Roma have promoted narrow definitions of culture that exclude the most impoverished. Cultural and social programmes for and about Roma focus on what makes Roma stand out from the majority: traditional occupations such a tin making, spoon making and playing music. For example, the 2002 Roma Fair held outside the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, in Bucharest, featured Roma demonstrating a range of traditional occupations, few of which are practised today. Such exotic images of Roma tradition and ahistorical cultural paradigms directly influence who is recognized as Roma under EU-guided neoliberal social policies. Official definitions of Roma communities, such as those used in EU programmes for social change among Roma, conceive of Roma in these terms, failing to take into account the current lives of most Roma, including the poorest. Poor Roma in Pod, for example, express and take pride in Roma culture, despite not fitting into officially sanctioned definitions of authentic Roma crafts, occupations or attire.

      Roma in Romanian and European History: Stereotypes and Erasures