The London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony and its Polyphonous Aftermath

Global mega-events are widely perceived as a tool used by host countries’ elites to propagate national narratives. But how are the messages actually decoded by international publics? The article takes the case of the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to reveal the multifaceted character of mediated responses to a global event. This case is particularly important for both postcolonial studies and globalization studies because the British self-presentation silenced the country’s imperial past. In the aftermath, there were varying degrees of both attention and interpretative depth. Most notably, the omission of the imperial past of the host country was not scandalized by most authors of the “global south.” Instead, newspaper reports were characterized by affirmation, localization, criticism, or benign neglect. Empirically, the study is based on online versions of 26 newspapers from Argentina, Cuba, Germany, Great Britain, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe, as well as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Al Jazeera.