afl ahoy hoy

i found out on the weekend that my AFL paper has been accepted for the Dialogue Across Cultures conference in November. This is very exciting for me. i’ve wanted to write about this for a really long time. Here’s the abstract. Comments especially welcome, as this is an ongoing project:

Fixing the Past: Niche Nationalism and the AFL

This paper introduces the idea of ‘niche nationalism’ to make sense of some of the complex ways citizenship and belonging are staged in contemporary Australian culture. As part of a wider study into the way that nationalism is understood in different subcultural contexts, it reflects on the function served by the Australian Football League as a platform for dialogue between competing cultural histories. An aim of the AFL’s mission statement is to ‘foster good citizenship, both on and off the playing field’. My interest is in the myths of nation and appropriate performance endorsed in this goal, and particularly how these relate to the special event games in the League’s calendar: the Kokoda Game, the ANZAC Day match and the Indigenous Game.

Sport has long been regarded as a metaphorical (if ‘civilized’) reenactment of the combat situation with its shared traits of heroism, courage, survival and triumph. In relation to indigenous histories, there is a limit to how much can be mapped onto this same terrain. If part of the AFL’s pedagogical value is to draw attention to foundational moments of Australian history on the football field, the black player’s body disturbs the neatness of this civic role. It draws attention to an originary and ongoing war over land and sovereignty that can’t be captured in the narrative of exposure, performance and resolution characterizing a single game. Indigenous dispossession can’t be told with the same imagery as those battles sanctified in the genre of the memorial match.

A specific form of nationalism is at work in the AFL’s keenly felt civic responsibility, one which fixes the past in two senses. On the one hand, as it instills respect for those who have fought to secure the nation (which is also to say the game), it promotes and reifies a mainstream version of history premised on notions of The Digger, sacrifice and mateship. But at the same time, the AFL seeks to ‘fix’ what’s silenced in this version of the past by intervening to improve the present conditions of indigenous people, especially through its Kickstart outreach program. The AFL circumvents and to an extent overrides the traditional political power of established civic institutions which may lack the means or resolve to deliver financial support for indigenous citizens and foster positive role models for their communities. In turn, indigenous AFL players are expected to perform in a manner appropriate to such a gesture. The trade-off for accepting the AFL’s benevolence as a route out of indigenous disadvantage is to conform to a strict regimen. References to indigenous people’s situation outside the football field cannot be allowed to spill over the boundary fence.

The unifying promise of AFL is to offer us the imagery for a nationalism that will elide and perhaps resolve the challenge posed by racial difference. But the extent of its success rests on a continuing disavowal of the initial conflict which allows the nation itself to be seen as meaningful.