Postcolonial France by Paul Silverstein

Author:Paul Silverstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Yet, as John MacAloon (1984) has compellingly argued, official, sacred rituals of national allegiance and joyous (or mournful) popular festivals of communion are always at risk of being undone by overly orchestrated, politicized, or commercialized spectacle. Examples of such subversions abound for mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics, when the grandiosity of their ideological narratives or visual productions overwhelm the human feelings they are ostensibly meant to invoke, perhaps most famously during the 1936 Berlin and 2008 Beijing Olympics. While the original Parisian marche républicaine maintained its communal sense in spite of the presence of world leaders, its one-year commemoration came off to would-be participants as utterly staged and overly policed. Rather than the bonds of sadness and outrage providing a sensation of common identity, the “stiff choreography” of remembrance seemed to dictate how and in what patriotic form one was supposed to feel the nation, fragmenting for good any capacity to unite in multi-directional memory under “Je suis Charlie” (Hollis-Touré 2016: 297).

Given their massive size and global media transmission, major sporting events likewise can serve as compelling platforms for ideological messages that may run contrary to the peaceful national or urban rivalries officially enshrined. The kidnapping of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group at the 1972 Munich Olympics is certainly the most iconic such event, but the targeting by Islamic State militants of the France–Germany friendly being played at the Stade de France during the November 2015 Paris attacks follows the same spectacular logic. On a less violent but equally political scale, Anelka’s quenelle broadly recapitulated the Black Power salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Like Smith and Carlos, Anelka was ultimately sanctioned not for the content of his gesture as such, but for its violation of the ban on any political or religious signs beyond those directly associated with the teams at play. That football, like all sport, is deeply tied to politics at local, national, and transnational scales has been well-documented (see Boniface 2002; Dorsey 2016; Farred 2008; Fatès 1994; Foer 2004; Kuper 2006). What is at issue here is when politics itself breaks down; when the national spectacle of unity-in-diversity reveals itself to be little more than superficial, commercialized theater; and when rival, racialized expressions of postcolonial difference emerge in forms that cannot be easily contained in a stadium ritual or a museum display.

SINGING AND HISSING

For many observers, the multicultural promises embodied in the 1998 World Cup victory came crashing down during an October 2001 France–Algeria friendly played at the Stade de France in the northern Parisian banlieue of Saint-Denis. Organizers billed the first ever meeting of senior national sides as a moment of “reconciliation” (Dubois 2010: 198–213).10 As discussed in earlier chapters, the French–Algerian war remained a raw nerve in France, broadly effaced from official memory and rarely publicly discussed or taught. Indeed, it was only two years earlier that the French government finally officially recognized the anti-colonial conflict as a “war” rather than simply “events” or an internal policing operation.

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