Abstract
This paper evaluates the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as an exercise in public history. Public events have been widely identified within the study of nationalism as festivals that attempt to reinforce national identity and belonging. Contemporary Olympic Games figure in this literature as a specific form of event where the nature and content of a host state's identity is displayed for the global gaze of other nations. While opening ceremonies perform a rich display of national identity in any case, London 2012 is particularly significant for taking place at a time of major political contestation in the UK and has frequently been interpreted as an expression of radical patriotism. Traces of such patriotic thought associated particularly with England can be found in the opening ceremony's historical pageant and overall concept, showing resonances with the work of Raphael Samuel, who argued for a radical patriotism grounded in a multiplicity of accounts of the national past from many social positions. Depicting the nation through a multiplicity of biographical narratives produces a ‘mosaic’ mode of representation which can be seen in other documentary and public history projects and in the political context of British public multiculturalism in the 2000s. This responds to the need for any national narrative to be composed through compressing the lives of millions of people into one coherent story, but complicates attempts to read a text such as the opening ceremony for what they ‘really’ mean. A model for understanding narratives of the past as being produced in interaction between their initial creator(s) and their reader(s) is necessary for understanding not only the London 2012 opening ceremony in particular but also public history and narratives of the national past in general.
Highlights
The opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games raises many questions for how we – whether ‘we’ are historians, artists, film-makers, audiences – represent and interpret the past. It was concerned with expressing a narrative of national identity anchored in the past, and did so by representing that nation as the sum of multiple biographical narratives – a ‘mosaic’ mode that has affinities with the radical patriotism of social historians such as Raphael Samuel or Christopher Hill
In January 2011, the education secretary Michael Gove had announced a review of the National Curriculum for history, building on his October 2010 speech to the Conservative Party conference in which he stated that ‘[t]he current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story’ (Gove 2010)
Marshall’s Our Island Story immediately positioned the curriculum reform in opposition to the effort to tell more diversified and democratised narratives of British history, which had itself been in reaction against the homogeneity and conservatism that Raphael Samuel – who called one of his books Island Stories, plural – and other critics identified in Marshall
Summary
The opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games raises many questions for how we – whether ‘we’ are historians, artists, film-makers, audiences – represent and interpret the past.
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