Hegemonic settler-colonial structure

Philosophy Go Premium You go, girl. The JC looks deep into the well. Or abyss. Click ᐅ to expand: Philosophy Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“Here, breaking is a space for those ‘othered’ by Australian institutions to express themselves and engage in new hierarchies of respect. We argue that breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies.”

—Dr Rachael Gunn, The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification, September 2023

Hegemonic settler-colonial structure
/ˌhiːɡɪˈmɒnɪk sɛtlə-kəˈləʊniəl ˈstrʌkʧə/ (n.)
A system where a dominant group (often from a colonising country) establishes control over a territory and its indigenous population.

Hegemonic

“Hegemonic”, we suppose, because a small group with instutionalised power becomes dominant and imposes its own cultural, economic, and political influence upon the values, norms, and systems of a disempowered subordinate group. In any case, some pre-existing power structure whose existing mechanisms impose political order and hierarchy on a “society” of some sort.

Colonial

“Colonial” suggests that the hegemony then involuntarily appropriates and exploits the marginalised society’s cultural artefacts and resources for its own ends — typically self-enrichment and personal vainglory. (In critical theory “colonisation” is supplanting the inferior expression “cultural appropriation” because it does not invoke the hegemonic structure’s own concept of intellectual property in the same way.)

Settler

“Settler” because the Colonial hegemonists do not “eat, root and leave” as the Kiwis put it, but rather they occupy, settling on the disenfranchised society’s own territory to the exclusion of the previously occupying indigenous population, who are expelled from their own homeland.

Worked example

But is this really all that germane to, well, Australian breakdancing?

Dr. Gunn, again: her paper, prepared in the lead-up to Paris 2024, highlights real risks should “breaking” leave its obscure intersectional roots in the dispersed “scenes” in the unfashionable fringes of Australian cities and go global.

“An expressive and social dance style originating in the Bronx, developed and largely practised by People of Colour ... does not easily ‘fit’ with the construction of the idealized Australian sporting hero – the large, muscular, White, cismale uniformed body enculturated as part of an established sporting institution.”

Now, we can carp about critical theory grievance warriors churning out self-absorbed misery baloney on the public purse, but Dr. Gunn’s warnings here were prescient. Everything dr Gunn foresaw came to pass: Australia was represented at the Olympics by “Bgirl Raygun”, a uniformed, white, “cisgendered” female athlete — JC would not presume to remark on a lady’s musculature or size, but she seemed quite enculturated as part of the established Australian sporting institution. She even performed in a green-and canary yellow Aussie tracksuit, rather than the streetwear favoured by other younger contestants from other nations.

So, who wa this Bgirl Raygun? None other than one Dr Rachael Gunn, lecturer in the cultural politics of, well, breaking, at Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature.

Don’t say she didn’t warn you, kids!

See also

• Fox Sport Australia’s backgrounder to Breaking’s inclusion in the 2024 Olympics
• Critical theory