Olympic Opening Ceremonies

<p>This is the first book to unpack the history and significance of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games the frontispiece of the most watched event on Earth. </p><p>Covering the period from the Moscow Olympics in 1980 to Tokyo 2020 the book examines when how and why the Olympic opening ceremonies’ artistic programme became the multi-act spectacles seen today. It argues that the embedded nationalistic ethnic and environmental discourses contained in opening ceremonies have much to tell us about national narratives memory and myth-making about the history of representation and about how the Olympics and the spectacle of mega-events are prisms through which local and global socio-political issues are refracted from the climate crisis and the struggle for minority rights to the emergence of a multi-polar world. </p><p>This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology culture history or politics of sport and events geopolitics or performance studies.</p>