Mediating cosmopolitanism: crafting an allegorical imperative through Beijing 2008

Abstract

The article examines intertwined cosmopolitan and national narratives in the context of the Beijing 2008 Games. Through a discursive analysis of the opening and closing ceremonies it seeks to provide some insight into understandings of Chinese national identity as a ‘displaced’ agent in the ‘birth’ and ‘evolution’ of Western European civilisation, who returns to claim a central place in human history. The artistic production of such resentful discourses develops alongside its technological counterpart, providing insight into the ways national citizenships remain gendered and racialised. For activist networks and the critics of the Olympic project this ‘mediated’ cosmopolitanism harbours a performative contradiction, as it sanctions Chinese policies that erase certain social identities from the nation-state. The multicultural ambiance of the Olympic mega-event symbolically resolves the crisis generated by the calls for national development through careful urban planning that violates human rights. An interdisciplinary analysis of the two ceremonies and secondary material suggests that national self-narration takes place simultaneously in different expressive/visual modes, enabling the coexistence (and communication) of the ‘symbolic’ with the ‘material’ in what I will term an ‘allegorical imperative’. This imperative, a miniature of the Olympic discourse on human dignity, is constitutive of the anthropopoetic project.

Keywords:

• allegorical imperative
• cosmopolitanism
• nationalism
• Olympic Games
• urban planning

Notes

1. Deng Xiaoping's post-Maoist revolution, which reshaped China through market economy and private entrepreneurship, created a ruling ‘middle class’ whose status was predicated on conspicuous consumption (accelerated by the Westernised mass media) and educational attainment (Xu 2007, p. 366). In reality, education remained a positional good, excluding the greatest part of the nation (peasants and segments of the working class) from the public sphere, whereas gendered hierarchies persisted within the nation's cosmopolitan elites.