Permanent Temporality: Race, Time, and the Materiality of Romanian Identity Cards

Ildikó Zonga Plájás

doi:10.1177/01622439211043200

Abstract

Documents, in particular identity cards, mediate relationships between individuals and institutions. Their materiality matters and actively impacts how states govern populations and their movements. In this paper, I examine one such object, the Romanian identity card. Focusing on its temporality and agency, I explore how objects and technological procedures enact race. In Romania, people without an address or proof of residence—many of them members of segregated Roma communities living in deep poverty—can only receive a temporary identity card, the Carte de Idenititate Provizorie (CIP). CIP holders do not enjoy full citizenship and are deprived of various rights, such as the right to travel without a passport within the European Union. They are also exposed to heightened surveillance as they must apply annually for a new CIP. Starting from the material object of the CIP, I explore how race comes into being as a relation at the intersection of various temporalities that are folded into the rules and bureaucratic practice entailed in its issue. I offer the concept of “permanent temporality” to analyze how racialization occurs in practices of governing people and their movement in Europe.

Highlights

IntroductionScience and technology studies (STS) scholars have developed a vibrant body of research on race (see, e.g., Koening, Lee, and Richardson 2008; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010)
In the past decade, science and technology studies (STS) scholars have developed a vibrant body of research on race
I examine the discriminatory effects of this sociotechnical system of governance and how it contributes to the enactment of race and racialization (Schinkel 2009; M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014b; De Genova 2017; van Baar 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have developed a vibrant body of research on race (see, e.g., Koening, Lee, and Richardson 2008; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010). Ideas about the (non)deserving citizen resonate with how officials talk about cleanliness and dirtiness, where a new document is by definition clean, and with the degree of standardization and, as a consequence, the degree of citizenship This becomes clear when I observe another citizen, an older man, getting ready to have his ID photo taken, this time for a regular (plastic) ID card. Those who manage to escape poverty, move out of the racialized areas, and get their papers in order might be able to obtain a regular identity card Their digital file will still carry the material residue of their many renewals, where the sheer amount of data reveals the history of once being a CIP holder. These groups of people are stuck in a permanent temporality while simultaneously being racialized

Conclusion

Declaration of Conflicting Interests