Olympic Bidding, Multicultural Nationalism, Terror, and the Epistemological Violence of ‘Making Britain Proud’

By Mark Falcous and Michael L. Silk

Volume 10, Issue 2, pages 167-186

Abstract

This paper excavates the entanglement of British nationalist identity politics with sport, terrorism, place re-imagining, mega-event bidding, and corporate neoliberalism. We focus on London’s 2012 olympic bidding and the coalescence of corporate, state, civic, and sporting interests surrounding the national (re)imaginings that characterised the bid. We open with a critical reading of the bid narratives explicating how selective assertions of Britishness were envisioned through the motifs of harmonious multicultural unity, ‘youth’, and passion for sport. We focus on how these narratives offered up ‘idealised’ multicultural citizens and harmonious diversity as a reactionary form of nationalist ‘pride politics’ (Fortier 2005). We subsequently juxtapose these narratives with a critical reading of English press and political discourse in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings – the day after London was awarded the olympic games. This juxtaposition reveals the tensions and ambiguities between assertions of inclusive civic nationalism – that apparently transcends ethnic difference – and the geo-politics of the ‘war on terror’ within Britain’s post-imperial self imaginings. Specifically, we tease out the place – and ambiguities – of the 2012 olympics within these imaginings reading the London games as an exemplar of a soft-core ideological spectacle informing selective nationalist narratives within the context of unfolding neoliberal politics.

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Split Allegiances: Cultural Muslims and the Tension Between Religious and National Identity in Multicultural Societies

By Liza Hopkins and Cameron McAuliffe

Volume 10, Issue 1, pages 38-58, April 2010

Abstract

Second generation Australians from a Muslim background have appeared on the political radar recently as a group at risk of disengagement due to their potentially split allegiances. For these young Australians, the traditional tension over diasporic allegiances between the homeland and the country in which they live is further complicated by religious identity. This paper offers two case studies of the second generation of two mainly Islamic, but otherwise very different, ethnonational communities in Australia, Turkish and Iranian. It examines the responses of these groups to the rising essentialisation and ethnicisation of Islam, at the expense of ethnic and sociocultural difference. In particular, the paper focuses on the way secular practice and religious identity converge into ‘cultural Islam’. We use the term cultural Islam as a way of describing those, particularly of the second and third generations in Australia, who proudly claim their Islamic heritage while choosing not to participate actively in religious life.

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Continuity and Change in the Minority Policies of Greece and Turkey

By Georgios Niarchos

Volume 6, Issue 1, pages 30-48, March 2006

Abstract

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