Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman

one of the women selling the peasant-style costumes about the shirts, skirts and gowns on display in front of her. She said that she was a Rudari, not a Romni or Ţiganca, and that she had inherited the clothes, but she was not sad about putting them up for sale as long as she made good money from them. She said that if she told people she was a Rudari, few would understand who she was; and rather than risk being taken for a Ţigancă, she preferred to be mistaken for a Romanian peasant.

      Economic differences among the participants were reflected not only in their attitudes towards Roma identification, but also in their self-confidence and market knowledge. The common denominator ‘Roma’ covered multiple groups that engaged in the so-called traditional occupations listed in the brochure. The presentation of the live demonstrations as part of a fair with merchandise for sale favoured some occupations and Roma groups over others. The simple garments of the Rudara failed to live up to expectations of authenticity and attracted less visitor attention. Kelderara showed the most distinctive features that ‘branded best’ in relation to the commodification of ethnicity in neoliberal capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Indeed, Kelderara metonymically replace the common denominator ‘Roma’ in popular perceptions: their costumes and artefacts are the most recognizable and most cited in other instances of identity commodification, from Gypsy soaps to music and ethnic chic. At the fair the Kelderara clothing underwent the shift mentioned in the brochure, from utilitarian objects to artworks, and sold successfully – not simply as ethnic ‘Roma’ markers, but as ethnicity itself.

      The Kelderara artefacts and products that enjoyed the most success at the fair became ethnocapital, a means of both self-construction and sustenance (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Whereas visitors inside the museum had to wait to reach the museum shop to purchase merchandise, at the fair they could buy directly from the stalls. This process, which combined recognition as a minority with consumption in the marketplace, reflected identity formation processes during post-socialism. Heritage represents culture named and projected into the past, and simultaneously the past congealed into culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 149). This understanding of culture equally pervaded social programmes that sought to revive the utilitarian character of traditional occupations along with training for other types of income-generating activities, as I show in Chapter 3.

      The Roma themselves are absent from official histories in Romania, and for them the past is veiled by their construction as living in a continuous present, without care or concern for the past. Recognizable, lucrative stereotypes facilitate the continued forgetting of Roma history. As the Comaroffs show, ‘identity, from this vantage, resides in recognition from significant others, but the type of recognition, specifically, expressed in consumer desire’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 10). The incorporation of Roma culture as ethnocapital through its most recognizable and distinctive aspects has not only responded to market demand, but has also become compatible with ethnic nationalism in Romania through commodification.

      Offered temporary shelter inside and outside the museum, which told the story of the ethnic nation and its folklore, the fair exceeded national paradigms. Both indoor and outdoor events at the fair were temporarily hosted by the ‘archive’, represented by the museum itself – from which the Roma had been excluded, even while elements of Roma culture had been appropriated. The place of the museum was anchored in hegemonic narratives supported by the state, whereas the fair was a temporary space.² For those who cared to listen and pay attention to the contradictions in the ostensibly seamless narrative of the museum, the fair wrote minor history by combining the archive and the repertoire, using archival evidence of Roma history while foregrounding the living cultures of diverse Roma.

      The Rudara objects and costumes were less successful in the marketplace than the Kelderara because the Rudara artefacts looked similar to the Romanian peasant outfits displayed inside the museum. While the museum’s hosting of the fair emphasized the distinction between what was inside (the Romanian peasants and their traditions) and what was outside (the Roma and their occupations and costumes), the Rudara disrupted this clear separation dictated by normative monoethnic performativity, and made apparent the arbitrariness of official definitions of the Romanian folk versus Roma culture. The display of almost identical items inside the museum and outside at the fair, under different denominations and prices, was thus a strong statement about the similarities between some Roma (such as Rudara) and Romanian peasants, and about the processes of cohabitation and mutual influence over centuries. Rather than inserting a rupture between Romanian peasants and Roma craftspeople in the guise of Self and Other, the Rudara and their costumes suggested a continuum along which different ethnic identities could be placed and contextually self-identified, always in relation to one another.

      The Museum of the Romanian Peasant as an institution has excluded any other ethnicity and established a monocultural history of the Romanian nation. A minor history approach reveals precisely how multiplicity and multivocality – lived experience in a multicultural context – have been translated into a univocal narrative of the nation at the museum.

      Minor Histories: From Slavery to the Holocaust

      The speech cited at the opening of this chapter is illustrative of a more widespread attitude among the Romanian political class towards the Roma minority: the formal embrace of European policies on Roma on the one hand, and the absence of their practical application on the other. More specifically, the speech reflects the treatment of Roma history, where the acknowledgment and discussion of little-known aspects such as the Holocaust or Roma slavery do not lead to a change in national paradigms based on ethnicity. Similarly, legislative changes to end discrimination against Roma have not altered national institutions and their discriminatory practices. The President’s plea for EU money at the end of his speech indicates an expectation that, as far as he was concerned, the Roma in Romania were the EU’s responsibility.

      President Băsescu’s speeches over the years reflect the evolution of some sections of the political class’s attitude in Romania. The post-socialist diversity discourse, a result of Romania’s EU negotiations, slowly gained traction in political rhetoric and reflected a change in direction for some politicians, from inflammatory rhetoric regarding Roma to a more ‘politically correct’ attitude. Many journalists viewed Băsescu’s 2007 Roma Holocaust speech with suspicion as a pre-election campaign manoeuvre, with the photo shoot featuring the President flanked by the three survivors, politicians from the Roma Party, and Roma King Florin Cioabă, a Kelderara leader from the Sibiu region. Journalists reminded the public that only a few months previously the President had called a female journalist a ‘stinking Ţigancă’ because she had insisted on getting an answer from him in an unsolicited interview. Faced with international pressure, the President apologized for using an inappropriate phrase in public, but made no mention of the racial slur or sexist remark. Roma NGOs considered the apology inappropriate.³ A few years before this incident, when Băsescu was Mayor of Bucharest, he called for Roma to be placed in ghettoes outside cities.⁴ These examples show that politicians’ convenient adoption of a progressive rhetoric has entailed little in the way of treating Roma as equal citizens.

      In 2010 the Romanian Senate debated a proposal by Roma activist and scholar Vasile Ionescu and the Roma Party to mark the end of Roma slavery with an annual commemoration day and to include Roma slavery as a topic on the general school curriculum. The senators – all of them non-Roma – rejected the proposal. (In fact, Senator Paul Hasoti proposed ‘Ţigan’ as an ethnonym to be used instead of ‘Roma’. He claimed it was not a pejorative term, as it meant ‘alien’ and could equally be found in other languages.⁵)The Romanian Senate’s initial rejection of the emancipation commemoration day is a reflection of the privilege of the majority and the refusal to grant Roma the right to define themselves. Eventually the proposal was accepted and passed into law in March 2011, and 20 February became Emancipation Day. Roma activists annually celebrate Emancipation Day with commemorations and public events. Like the Roma Fair, these events tell a story that is uncomfortable and incompatible with the logic of monoethnic nationalism.