Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman

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) and for citizenship are identical in Romania. Ethnic minorities use separate terms to refer to their citizenship and their ethnicity. Ethnic nationalism differs in principle from civic nationalism, where membership is not based on ethnic belonging; however, both types of nationalism engender racism (see Kymlicka 2000; Brubaker 1999). For example, notwithstanding claims to civic nationalism, the legal protection of racial divisions in the United States lasted for centuries; as Aiwha Ong (2003, 6) writes, ‘racial logic has always lain like a serpent in the sacred ideal of American citizenship’.

11. Nancy Fraser sees subaltern counterpublics as: ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (1992, 123).

12. Warner’s (2002) focus on the transformative possibilities of counterpublics signals their radical potential.

13. Judith Butler (1990) discusses the performative constructions of gender identities, while Fredrik Barth (1969) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2014) show that ethnic and racial identities are performatively deployed in the crucible of economic and political tensions and contingent upon changing relations of power.

14. See debates on the cross-cultural use of ‘race’ in Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999), Shohat and Stam (1994) and Hanchard (2003).

15. Étienne Balibar (2004, 8) defines ‘demos’ as the collective subject of representation, decision making and rights, and ‘ethnos’ as the historical communities based on ethnic belonging. When Roma pass as citizens, unrecognized as Roma, their contribution is appropriated by the ethnos, the ethnic nation.

16. Stuart Hall (1980) argues that Blacks in Britain experienced racial discrimination through class.

17. Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman (1998) made similar observations about the relationship between race and class in Brazil.

18. The European Commission for Culture uses the terms ‘diversity’ and ‘interculturalism’, a version of multiculturalism that focuses on the individual rather than the recognition of groups and is closer to integration and assimilation (see http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/default_en.asp, accessed 1 December 2011). The term ‘multiculturalism’ mobilizes several meanings, from the coexistence of multiple cultures and ethnicities within a territory,