In this reading O’Keeffe centers a history of Romani people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s largely on the concepts of performance and ethnography.
The concluding chapter does a great job of summing up these concepts with a focus on Roma-descended writer Aleksander Germano. Though born to a Romani mother and not at all raised by his Czech father, Germano grew up in a family of industrial laborers and did not have a nomadic upbringing, nor one that involved much Roma culture. As a young adult, Germano pursued a writing career and wound up in the “All-Russian Gypsy Union” where he learned Romani language and came to identify with Romani culture and nationality. He became a “gypsy poet” but still maintained an outsider and “a Russian civilizer and ethnographer of Roma(242).”
Germano identifies himself as an ethnographer because he believes he is bringing order to Romani life with his work in the Gypsy Union. From what I gather, the role of the ethnographer in the 1930s was that of a “civilizer” who comes to understand a ‘less developed’ culture in order to know how to ‘develop’ (read: “westernize”) it. I see performance come in as he grapples with the question of being Romani. Germano talks around his heritage when identifying with the Roma does not suit him, but when he goes to work with the Gypsy Union, he claims Gypsy nationality boldly(246).
I guess I’m raising the question of whether wanting to be a full-fledged Soviet citizen is compatible with claiming Romani or Gypsy identity. And also, how authentic is Germano’s reclamation of his heritage in the eyes of the Soviet government, the public that consumed his work, and the Romani people he worked with?
I find the comparison between Germano’s life and self-presentation with the actors of Theatre Romen compelling. While Germano is presenting really only himself, the players are performing themselves and their culture.
Romani people were marginalized by the Soviet government at least as far as representation within the Soviet state went. An example of this is how Romani cultural artifacts were glaringly excluded from the Ethnographic Department’s museum. To make up this short coming, the Romani people came to be represented live, through theatre as living exhibits(208). After tsyganshchina fell out of favor with the Soviet government, exaggerated, rather inaccurate, and Russianized representations of Romani people, dress, and music were recognized as appropriate. The Romani actors in this theatre were a bourgeoisie of sorts, though their inclusion of nomadic Romani actors was often applauded as a great asset to authenticity.
I may be getting too anthro with this but I’m wondering what it means to one’s authenticity if you must perform a parody of yourself and your culture to be recognized as belonging to your culture.
Also, how does this attention to the absence of physical Romani cultural artifacts in the museum interact with the idea that Romani culture exists only in music, especially if that music is “dead”(198)?
And, bonus thought, I’m really interested in the feminization of Romani culture and the hypersexualization of Romani women and culture, especially as a supposed corrupter of the Soviet man. I’m seeing exotification in this dynamic which is even more interesting considering the Russifying of Romani cultural productions. Like, what does it mean to mark something as foreign but still integrate into the ‘native’ culture?
I like your questioning of “authenticity” – it kept coming up again and again as I read O’Keefe, especially as acceptably Soviet depictions of gypsy culture kept changing and changing! O’Keefe seems to be arguing that “authenticity” was second in priority to the aims of changing Soviet cultural policy (e.g. depicting idealised New Soviet Gypsies singing songs about building socialism in the age of industrialisation.)
That narrative of changing “authenticity” does eventually lead to a final Russification – another question that you raise. Something that would be relevant is the “rehabilitation” of Russian identity during World War II, discussed by Martin discusses in his metanarrative of Soviet nationalities policy: it would explain, for example, why the Theatre Romen would be jumping to produce Russian classics while Germano was simultaneously effacing his gypsy origins from his biogaphy. Perhaps at this point in the Stalinist 30s, gypsy culture (and other forms of “national culture”), at this point in the Stalinist 30s, seems to be defined not only by changing nationalities policy, but also by its opposition it to a ascendent (Great) Russian culture.
Taking a step back, both of your questions seem to be best answered in reference to changing Soviet cultural policy – it’s a little frustrating, though, how O’Keefe doesn’t do that work in the extracts we’re reading.
I think that the anti-tsyganshchina campaigns at the end or after the NEP years were a really interesting place to examine this issue of authenticity. In many instances non-Romani critics and officials headed the campaigns and wrote about authenticity, the feminization of Romani dance and culture, and how the performances attacked socialist ideologue. Because of this dominant narrative Romani activists and performers had to incorporate this issue of authenticity and attempt to adapt to the political culture of the time.
It seems to me that the ideologue-based criticisms of Romani performances more often than not came from a place of prejudice that centerned on needs to be Western and “developed” and that could have just as easily been found in Tsarist Russia. We see time and time again that Bolshevik ideology fails to significantly change from the imperialism of its predecessor.
I think O’Keeffe implicitly argues against an objectively authentic version of Romani culture. She takes care to highlight the multiplicity of Romani experiences in the Soviet Union, and how many people sought to distance themselves from the nationality when politically expedient, as Germano did from time to time. O’Keeffe identifies Germano’s constant self-(re)invention as a product for “bureaucratic consumption.” (239) This theme of bureaucratic consumption is I think the greatest external force in shaping Romani identity. While hardliners like Shteinpress demonized tsyganshchina as the harbinger of Western imperialist “stylish suits” and “American dances,” the state incentivized the creation of neatly packaged and easily performed narratives of “Romani-ness”. (203) Given Germano’s (and surely others’) changing relationship to Romani identity depending on the state’s attitude toward it, it seems that the state had as much a hand in not only the stage representation of the culture, but also of its performance in everyday life as a complementary Soviet nationality. I’d be interested to know how the Romani stage presence during the time O’Keeffe covers affected Romani culture going forward. Were they pressured to perform their “Romani-ness” or “Soviet-ness” in a certain way?
I think a problem with this reading, as opposed to the reading on the J.A.R., is that it gives no context as to the state of Romani people before the Revolution, aside from the general statement that they were marginalized, nomadic, and largely employed as employers. If we were given that context, I think it would be easier to answer the authenticity question. The one thing I was able to glean is that there were multiple Romani dialects which are divergent to the extent that the Romani actors were not able to understand each other. This would point to the general concept that there is no unified Romani culture, and that the image of the unified Romani culture is a Soviet construction, although all of this is merely speculation.
I think there’s an interesting contrast between the way you notice O’Keeffe characterizing Germano and the way she describes the Theater Romen. On 193-194 she stakes her claim for chapter five, “the stage was a place where manipulable national forms – lively music, wild dances, and colorful costumes – afforded them the socialist content of Soviet respectability. For them, performing Gypsiness meant becoming Soviet both on- and offstage” (193-194). I think you bring this up in a number of ways in your post, but I would again emphasize the question of how we interpret the contrast between Germano attempting to reclaim his own heritage from an ethnographic perspective and the Theater Romen actors attempting to claim Soviet ‘citizenship’ through performing a parody of their own ethnic identity. Does this contrast support the claim that there does not exist a true cultural ‘authenticity’?
It seems like your question about claiming Romani identity within the soviet union speaks to the tension between theory and practice in the Soviet Union; theoretically the soviet model should allow for the claiming of cultural and ethnic identities – that’s what the whole concept of Soviet cultural policy was supposed to address. But in practice, that obviously wasn’t the case and ethnic minorities like Romani were treated terribly by majority populations. While the stereotypes associated with Romani were unique (and especially their relationship to the NEP and other more monied people in the early years of the Soviet Union) their relationship to sovietness doesn’t seem all that different than that of other minority populations.
“Also, how does this attention to the absence of physical Romani cultural artifacts in the museum interact with the idea that Romani culture exists only in music, especially if that music is “dead”(198)?”
It seems that such a duality was instrumental in the developing ambiguity of Romani culture in terms of performance. That ambiguity seemed to spring from the guiding soviet narratives that repeatedly transformed ethnographic theaters and receptions to them. Because “authentic” Romani culture was reduced to only music and dance, it became that much easier to misrepresent a people outwardly viewed as backward because Romani people were put in a box, so to speak, that they had no input in forming. It seemed to follow then why the term tsyganshchina seemed to lack a consistent definition, but fell under whatever connotation critics conceived. So, besides the labeling of the music and dance of Romani culture as “dead”, it was also labeled as capitalist, pornographic, too old, and unauthentic, among other things, as the term became synonymous with those labels. I think that this was the result of the Soviets trying to construct a “respectable” Romani culture that appealed to consumers of the culture, rather than the common Romani people themselves.