I don’t care much for the Olympics – they reek to me of everything that is wrong with corporatized sport, increasingly privatized cities, and the normalization of coercive security State. We can see the 2024-version of that State in fenced-off downtown Paris where residents have QR codes to allow them access to their homes. I can’t help but wonder at the data troves flowing to Big Tech from that – a trajectory we have been on since the US security state privatised collection and retention of tech-related data in the wake of 9/11, close to quarter of a century ago. All this makes me grateful to on-the-ground social movements and critical journalists and analysts who keep these issues in our sight.
This scepticism and mistrust, of course, doesn’t stop me being sucked in, in part because of what sport-savvy, media studies scholar Garry Whannel referred to a ‘vortextuality’. This occurs where some issues are so big and dominate the news cycles that they bleed into other areas of commentary and discussion, so that even unrelated areas of news invoke or draw on those events as metaphor. The Olympic games, especially the summer games, are a prime example of this phenomenon. They are the quintessence of what political scientist Jules Boykoff identified as ‘celebration capitalism’, and with it large scale privatization of much more than just city space.
Despite having, I like to think, a solid grasp of the techniques Whannel and Boykoff identify that draw us in, I can’t help but enjoy a good spectacle. There are few regular events more spectacular than an Olympic opening ceremony, although there are also few more tired and predictable than an Olympic opening ceremony.
Some of that predictability is to do with the established ritual elements – those formalised moments. More of that predictability is to do with the space of the ceremony – until now an enclosed private space, formalised for a particular set of activities that establish clearly understood forms of distance between an audience in the stands, which are seats, and the performers in an enclosed space of action. That space and those rituals combine to enforce a predictable structure even as it permits local variation at almost every stage of the event, except the formal rituals. As a result, we’re never surprised to see the depiction of the host nation and city, even if we are surprised or intrigued at the form of that representation.
The downside of thinking too much about this stuff is that that predictability makes these events rather dull – so the last time I recall watching an Olympic opening ceremony in full was London; some of that was on the TV, but by the time the fireworks got going I had moved onto the roof to watch them a mile or so to the east. That was it until the Paris opening ceremony because there was the prospect of something interesting – the enclosed private space of the event had been replaced by the more open, more public space of the central city. Here the theatrical performance followed by the athlete march past of 400m became a six kilometre boat trip for athletes alongside the national and city story-telling. The change in setting changed the form, the change in form undermined the predictability, raising my anthropological interest.
Paris, and with it France, told a fairly predictable story of itself – one of revolutionary democracy, liberal inclusion, and Liberté, égalité, fraternité despite the recent political successes of French fascism. There’s nothing particularly surprising about that, just as there is nothing all that surprising about the silences in that story – including France’s historic and continuing colonialist practice.
That silence was thrown into a powerful contrast by one of the most subtle but brutal take downs of the far-right in the form of Aya Nakamura’s brief but sharp appearance. Nakamura is a Malian born, French-raised AfroBeats singer songwriter, and the most streamed French language musician (around 6 billion streams, but even so it is to be expected that those of us over about 45 have not heard of her). Her work is multi-lingual, including migrant languages, street and banlieue slang. It’s not all that surprising then that when it was announced earlier this year that she might be performing, and singing an Edith Piaf song to boot, the far-right was outraged, claiming she is ”not French enough” (dog whistle Blackness anyone?) and abused the French language.
So all power to the organisers who had her perform her songs Pookie and Djadja (there might also have been a little Charles Aznavour in the performance) while dressed along with her dancers in gold by Dior. More potently they staged it on Le Pont des Artes, the pedestrian bridge linking the Louvre and the Institut de France, among the most significant markers of establishment French national culture. Nakamura came on to the bridge from the Left Bank, from the Institut, including the Académie Française, which determines the content and use of the French language – suggesting the legitimation of her multi-lingual argot. What’s more, she was supported in this performance by the band of the Garde républicaine – the police unit that provides the guards of honour at state and other official events, and seen by many as one of the most conservative and right wing of police units; yet, here, they danced to AfroBeats pop music.
It’s often the little things that pack a punch, and this performance was one of the most politically powerful moments in the ceremony, firmly asserting that Nakamura is more than ‘French enough’. Yet, in its power it points also to the things we didn’t see in the coverage, or anywhere. For instance, none of the French team wear hijab – not because there are no hijabi capable of performing at Olympic level, but because of a monolithic assertion of French-ness marked by what women wear on their heads. This is not a restriction on safety grounds – as in the spurious efforts by FIBA to ban hijab for basketball players in the 2010s and FIFA’s current efforts to enforce a hijab ban, but on the ground that ‘ostentatious displays of religious identity’ are forbidden. This has usually been interpreted as clothing, and although other items – crosses, turbans, kippah – are included, for the last 25 years this has been almost universally seen as about hijab, and criticised as both islamophobic and gender discrimination. What’s more, the ‘debate’ has been rooted in France’s continuing post-colonial crisis of identity and woven into the impact of far right. In this case, confronting coloniality is concealed by the usually unspoken cousin of Liberté, égalité, fraternité – laicite. Laicite, however, was never intended to be extended beyond the state to the actions and intimate lives of its citizens.
Similarly passed over by most commentators at the time were the actions of the Algerian team as they travelled along the Seine (credit to Radio France International here). When they reached the Pont Saint-Michel the call went out: ‘This intifada is for the memory of the martyrs of 16 October 1961’, and followed by team members throwing roses into the river. Here the team marked an attack by French National Police on the 30000 strong protest in support of Algerian independence that resulted in the deaths of between 30 and 300 Algerian protestors, whose bodies were dumped in the river and only some ever recovered. Despite the liberal inclusiveness and the claims of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and in the light of the rise of the far right and fascism, the republic remains scarred by its inability to confront its continuing imperial reach, which in the context of these games means the surfing is taking place in a time zone 12 hours behind Paris.
These official silences sat alongside the blurring of the presence and effects of colonialism and empire. Among the ten statues of women erected for the event we saw the Martinican writer Paulette Nardal, one of the driving forces of negritude, an intellectual movement asserting a form of Black consciousness that focused on literature and poetry. However, it very quickly became isolated from most forms of political resistance and by the time the wars of independence started it had become sanitised as a benign piece of intellectualism.
The other quite stunning performance was Guadeloupe mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel’s remarkably non-martial rendition of Les Marseilles while in the persona of Marianne and standing on the roof of the Grand Palais. With no criticism of Saint-Cirel here, I can’t be the first person to wonder at the contradiction between official presentation and everyday experience here. That is, I’m left pondering how long even the most qualified woman would last in a job search if she went to any interview with hair that natural, as surveys repeatedly tell us that ‘Black names’ and ‘Black hair styles’ are impediments to both employment and promotion, and become weapons of exclusion.
It’s fine that we celebrate recognition and inclusivity, that we shout out for Liberté, égalité, bisexualité at the library (you had to have seen it), and it’s great that in Aya Nakamura’s performance the organiser’s firmly rebutted the far right’s national fascism. But let’s not forget what we’re not seeing in the spectacle of nation and the pervasive presence of empire and coloniality. I couldn’t help but be reminded through my vortextual descent into Olympic spectacle of Yellowknife Dene political scientist Glen Sean Coulthard’s argument that neither contemporary marginalisation and oppression nor histories of colonial dispossession can be washed away by recognition and acknowledgment – entertaining as the spectacle might be.
