Once More, With Feeling: Sport, National Anthems, and the Collective Power of Affect

Abstract

In this paper I apply insights from Sport Studies, Indigenous Studies, Music Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies to illuminate and theorize the cultural, material, and political affective salience of national anthems staged prior to sporting events. To do so I analyze two different cases: The Aboriginal musical trio Asani’s 2014 multi-lingual performance of “O Canada” prior to an Oilers hockey game which closed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) events in Edmonton, Alberta; and the projection of hatred onto former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest of racism during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in 2016. Analysis suggests that these emotive, often visceral musical performances and responses are not contained within individual subjects but instead reflect contextually specific repetitive (dis)articulations across time, space, and a variety of bodies. Placed within broader colonial contexts, Asani’s version of the Canadian anthem is exemplary of the embodied sensory, but politically limited settler-oriented communitas of Canadian TRC inclusionary music as previously explicated by Robinson. Kaepernick’s anti-racist kneeling activism provides an additional case to theorize the relationship of national anthems in regards to movements for and against an imagined white nation as well as State-sanctioned colonization and hatreds.