Beyond the island story?: The opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games as public history

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.

Keywords::

• ceremony
• narrative
• national identity
• Olympics
• public history

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cathy Elliott, Adam Gutteridge, Hilda Kean, Lucie Matthews-Jones, Matthew McDowell and Emily Robinson, to two anonymous reviewers and to Alun Munslow for comments which have informed this version of the paper. Thanks also to students from Hymer College, Hull for responses to an even earlier version presented at an activity in November 2012.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Unofficial Histories conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in June 2013 and at a research seminar at Leeds Metropolitan University in December 2013.

^1. Robinson (2012) cites Mick Wallis's description of the ‘Towards Tomorrow’ pageant in 1938, dramatising the battle between ‘Capital’ and ‘Co-Operative Democracy’, which opened on a pastoral scene before ‘[a] factory chimney thrusts forty feet into the air’ and ‘[a] parade of banners circles the arena, charting the growth of co-operation from 1844 to 1914’ (Wallis 1995, 26). My thanks to Emily for referring me to this.

^2. Compare the composition of Julien Temple's film London: the Modern Babylon (2012), produced for the Cultural Olympiad, which contains a similar multiplicity of archive film footage, popular music and social history (interview) to produce a narrative of London, incorporating some of the same turning points such as mass migration from the Commonwealth after the Second World War.

^3. Similarly, writing on the Paralympics closing ceremony, Tyler (2013, 207 and 208) notes the disjuncture between what she considers the ceremony's simulacrum of a disability rights protest, with placards carrying generalised slogans, and the protests against the contractor Atos (the operators of the controversial Work Capability Assessments for people claiming disability-related benefits) that had taken place earlier the same day.

^4. See Hill (1972). Thanks to Adam Gutteridge for this point.

^5. Compare the critique of the ‘conservative understanding of reconciliation’ that some authors have discerned in the representation of Australian Aboriginal history in the Sydney 2000 opening ceremony (Elder, Pratt, and Ellis 2006, 181), or of the essentialisation of First Nations identities in recent Canadian opening ceremonies (Adese 2012). The Australian and Canadian critiques concur that the historical narratives of the respective ceremonies do not address the continued effects that colonialism still has on these countries' indigenous people(s) in the present.

^6. Compare the London 2012 closing ceremony, directed by a different team, where the familiar caricature of Churchill literally towered over events at a key moment.

^7. Frank Cottrell Boyce directly compares this approach to the films of Julien Temple, discussed above (2012a, vii).

^8. See Smith (1991).

^9. Attlee's reference to a ‘new Jerusalem’ used the last four lines of William Blake's hymn ‘Jerusalem’ at the end of his re-election speech, after the words ‘Let us go forward in this fight in the spirit of William Blake’ (Pearson 2012, 586).

^10. The limitations on whose voices are heard on @sweden and how are greater than they may at first seem: the organisers issue guidelines to curators about what the audience would like to read and steer curators away from ‘specific political agendas’, while structural limitations (users must have Internet access, be familiar with Twitter and able to tweet in English) mean that the potential curators pool is not representative of the ‘average’ Swede (Christensen 2013, 40 and 41). However, @sweden in practice is not a completely depoliticised space (different curators have, for instance, expressed opinions both for and against the most controversial topic in Sweden's international affairs, the extradition of Julian Assange), and the level of official trust placed in its voices has arguably led to a more advanced multivocality than anything comparable in Britain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Baker

Catherine Baker is Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Hull. She is a historian of nationalism and narrative and has also researched popular music after the break-up of Yugoslavia; the Eurovision Song Contest and the experiences of interpreters in post-socialist, post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.