Globalization or Coloniality? Delinking from the Roving Colonialism of Sport Mega-Events

Abstract

Sport mega-events are forms of “roving coloniality” rather than only being globalized and neoliberal processes. Coloniality refers to hidden dimensions of modernity, the concealed logics about life and death; race, sexualities, and genders. Within western modernity, answers to the problem of homophobia has been the liberal inclusion of white, western gays, and lesbians, yet this homonationalism, now common at global sporting events, is profoundly out of synch with the priorities of Indigenous and racialized communities impacted by the roving coloniality that descends upon their host cities. This chapter unpacks some of the logics of modernity/coloniality at recent Olympics. The first ever Pride Houses at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics foreclosed any discussion about queer settler solidarity with indigenous struggles in Canada. At the 2012 London Olympics a white-English form of sporting homonationalism emerged within a matrix of Islamophobia, racial neoliberalism, and imperial nostalgia. Global gay and lesbian protests against harsh anti-gay laws introduced to Russia just before the 2014 Sochi Olympics—important though they may have been—were complicit with Russian attempts to erase the 150th anniversary of the Circassian genocide that took place in Sochi. Thus, thinking about coloniality rather than globalization highlights an urgent need to delink from the ever-increasing thirst for security, the disposability of local communities and ecosystems, and unending liberal-imperialist calls to be included by sexual and gender minorities at Olympic games and World cup tournaments. Solidarity movements between activist groups seeking to resist colonialism, in its many forms, offer the most important insights into impacts of, and ways beyond, the roving coloniality of sport mega-events.