Hegemonic settler-colonial structure
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”.
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Philosophy
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“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 [1]
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.[2]
“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 the 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, well, Australian breakdancing? Well, it is the province of a young, cosmopolitan urban crowd.
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.”
Imagine, warns Dr. Gunn, some white middle-aged straighties in Aussie tracksuits pitch up and take over and kick out all the kids. How would that be?
We all saw how that would be.
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: Bgirl Raygun, a tracksuited, white, “cisgendered” female in her mid-thirties — JC would not presume to remark on a lady’s musculature or size — dyspraxically , 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