Hegemonic settler-colonial structure

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“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

The recently concluded Paris Olympics yielded many moments of tears, toil, triumph, tragedy and low comic farce but surely none more acute than the exploits — and we use the word advisedly — of the Australian competitive breakdancer, “Bgirl Raygun”.

Bgirl’s performance drew attention not just to her ingenious portfolio of downrocks like her “kanga-hop” and her “damaged wind turbine” but, more worryingly, to the malign influence that the “hegemonic settler-colonial structure” wields over Australian sport. About this, a far-sighted Australian academic was, by monograph, warning anyone who would listen in the months leading up to the championship.

What is a “hegemonic settler-colonial structure”? How could it lay Australian breakdancing low? Let JC explain.

Hegemonic settler-colonial structure
/ˌhiːɡɪˈmɒnɪk sɛtlə-kəˈləʊniəl ˈstrʌkʧə/ (n.)

A system where a dominant group (often from a colonising country) occupies and establishes control over a territory and its indigenous population.

“Hegemonic”, we suppose, because a small group with institutionalised power becomes dominant and imposes its own cultural, economic, and political values, over those of a disempowered resident group.

“Colonial” in 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” because having arrived, the colonial hegemonists do not simply “eat, root and leave” but rather they occupy, displacing the disenfranchised residents and expelling them from their own homeland.

Worked example

But is this really all that germane to breakdancing? Down under? Here is Dr. Gunn, again: from the same paper, prepared in the lead-up to Paris 2024. She 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.”

Imagine some middle-aged white straighties in Aussie tracksuits pitch up, kick out all the kids and take over. How would that be?

We all saw how that would be. Kudos, Dr. Gunn: we can carp about critical theory grievance warriors churning out untestable misery baloney from their ivory towers, but her paper was on the money. She warned us this would happen.

Everything Dr. Gunn feared came to pass: a white, “cis-gendered” female in her mid-thirties — JC would not presume to remark on a lady’s musculature or size, but she did seem towards the dyspraxic end of the “athletic” spectrum — uniformed, certainly: she performed in a green-and canary yellow Aussie tracksuit, rather than the streetwear favoured by other younger contestants, and made a point of punching the Australian crest on her breast and to that extent at least enculturated into the established institutions of Australian sport.

Where were the street kids for whom breaking was a way of life? Not having made the plane they weren’t there so we couldn’t see the look on their disenfranchised little faces but we imagine, blended in with the righteous anger of an exiled diaspora, there was yet a nagging sense of relief:

There, but for the grace of the hegemonic settler-colonial structure, go I.

So, who was this “Bgirl Raygun”? Where did she come from, to wreak such injustice?

In her other life, she is a lecturer in the cultural politics of breaking at Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature. The very same Dr. Rachael Gunn.

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