Martial Arts: Between Nationalism and 'Minor Literature'
Martial Arts: Between Nationalism and 'Minor Literature'
Paying close attention to the way that Petrus Liu sets up his argument in Stateless Subjects (Liu 2011) reaps rewards. The work stridently opposes and seeks to redress the tendency to read Chinese and Hong Kong martial arts literature (and film) as being ultimately somehow basically just about nationalism. The force and clarity through which he argues this is admirable and highly thought provoking. However, I am not entirely convinced that he successfully manages to reconfigure our understanding of this area. This is because, when reading his work, the now-clichéd line from Hamlet kept popping into my head – 'the lady doth protest too much, methinks'.
By this I mean that although Liu is a sophisticated writer (and hence perhaps I am not a subtle enough reader), and although his major claims and contentions involved an attention to the complexity and historical imbrication of Chinese martial arts literature and the twists and turns of history, I still felt that he overplayed his enabling observation about the injustice of reducing martial arts literature to what Jameson called 'national allegory' readings. Liu seeks to extricate the texts from their consignment to more or less nationalist productions and to demonstrate that, in actual fact, the textual features of the genre relate to the condition of protagonists being 'stateless subjects'.
It is in the study of these textual features and in resituating the texts in terms of a kind of aesthetic continuity that persevered at the same time and despite the modernizing and nationalizing tendencies of the May Fourth movement that would have preferred to see the back of such a genre that Liu's work is most successful. The differentiating of his perspective from any of the 'national allegory' positions is necessary, but overplayed, I think. This is because rather than 'opposing', Liu seems more interested in exposing subterranean forces and movements, tangential to, or under, through and between, the dominant currents.
One of the benefits of Liu's approach is that the modernizing and nationalizing forces of the 20th century in China come to be recast in such a way that they are shown to be more reactionary and Westernised in and through the desire to modernize and 'nationalise' than the writers of traditional genres of martial arts literature. As Liu writes (in relation to the 'Jin Yong phenomenon'):
Martial arts literature provides an opportunity for us to reevaluate the assumption, promulgated since the May Fourth period, that Chinese modernity could only be attained through the negation and destruction of its own traditions. Martial arts literature challenges our conventional sense that literary modernity belonged to those 'iconoclasts' who promoted the Europeanization of the Chinese language. The submerged political history of martial arts literature reveals one of the modes in which a desire for the West and its rationalism colonized Chinese intellectuals' consciousness in their self-appointed roles as saviors of the nation. For Liu Zaifu, Jin Yong's achievements and the reasons for his newfound canonicity reside precisely in his ability to develop an 'anti-Europeanized Chinese writing' against the May Fourth enlightenment ideology and Europeanized sentence structures, and Jin Yong's writing has succeeded in preserving China's 'accumulated cultural treasures'. (14-15)
At this point – at the end of this paragraph – however, I have a very clear image in my head of (as they say of energies in taijiquan) 'old yin' turning into 'young yang'. That is, it strikes me that this paragraph means that the modernizers and nationalizers of the 20th century were only operating according to one possible nationalizing logic – that of 'in with the new'. However, in the contemporary rediscovery of 'tradition', like this, it all smacks of being associated with a rather 'nostalgic' (and hence postmodern) nationalism.
Thus, to continue with another allusion to Shakespeare, although Liu claims to come to bury nationalism here, this also seems to amount to a certain kind of praising. To my mind, there is only something – and not everything – in Liu's reference to the argument that 'martial arts novels serve the repository of what Paul Ricoeur, Richard Dyer, and Fredric Jameson have called "the Utopian impulse" of society: the collective desire for a classless society that the development of capitalism fails to suppress' (15).
The absence of – or the bypassing of – the state in martial arts literature is crucial to Liu's sense that martial arts literature stands as a rumination on other (non-statist) forms of sociality. And I accept this argument. However, because it involves absence and bypassing, I think that the use of traditional academic terms like 'resistance' is what leads the sense of the argument in the wrong direction. Consider, for example, this:
martial arts literature offers an important form of subaltern resistance to the logic of internalized colonialism. If what made the martial arts novel aesthetically disreputable half a century ago is also what makes It a privileged object of cultural studies today, we have in this genre a unique opportunity to understand the lost organicity of Chinese culture before the bureaucratic rationalization of modernity. (15)
Crucial to making this paragraph 'work' are certain points that Liu neglects to mention, such as the important (Lacanian) point that an idea like 'lost organicity' does not have a referent. There never was a unity, organic wholeness or plenitude. This is a retroactively constituted 'nostalgic' myth for that which never existed, precisely because it is impossible (because it's either the Garden of Eden or the womb).
But there are other problems here. For if martial arts literature is indeed a continuation through modernity of a high cultural form, then it seems problematic to represent it as a kind of 'subaltern resistance'. Moreover, as Rey Chow might point out, this construction of literature as resistance smacks of the 'repressive hypothesis' that Foucault himself first seemed to hold (vis-à-vis the status of 'literature' in the face of the 'bureaucratic rationalization' of language) before going on to challenge such a view later on in The History of Sexuality. In other words, Liu seems to be forwarding the idea that a certain type of literature is non-nationalist and actively 'resistant' in and of itself. Chow has deconstructed this poststructuralist fetishistic overvaluation of literature on several occasions, but especially in The Protestant Ethnic. And Liu seems to be replaying it here. What is even more worrying in the passage quoted above is the implied sense that there really was an organicity before the emergence of modernity. If this is true, then Liu is being carried along by what Chow calls 'primitive passions' (Chow 1995, 2002; Bowman 2013b).
Of course, there is good reason to give Liu the benefit of the doubt and note that he is probably not falling into this trap. But the problem is that the terms being used to structure his framing of his project are a minefield. Consider this passage:
The mythic time of the wuxia imaginary belongs to the time of pre-capital; it constitutes an idealized space in which the subject and the object of social life are still unified before their fragmentation by the advent of capitalist modernity. What was once considered the result of an Infectious, commodified mass culture is today China's Homeric epic. (15)
Even though the first clause makes it clear that wuxia is set in 'mythic time', the unwary reader may still easily come away with the sense that there really was a time 'in which the subject and the object of social life [were] still unified before their fragmentation by the advent of capitalist modernity'. But, as contemporary theorists from the Lacanians of the 1980s and 90s to Rey Chow today have all made clear in various ways, the sense of a mythic complete and unified wholeness in the past is itself a symptomatic fantasy invented in the present.
Liu surely knows this, for it constitutes pretty much the horizon and backdrop of the realms of the literary and cultural theory within which this work exists. But the wording of much of the framing of the problematic tends to drive the text in directions I believe it would rather not go. A language of 'resistance', 'subalternity', and so on does not seem entirely appropriate to a text which seems really to be more organised by a 'yes, and…' spirit, rather than a 'no, but…' spirit. As Derrida once argued: the deconstructive approach should be one which embraces the logic of 'yes, and' rather than 'either/or'. So, here then, the martial arts literature can be shown to be also all of the things Liu says it is, as well as having functioned in the ways he demonstrates it 'shouldn't' (only) have been.
In order to set out some of the alternative approaches to and uses and values of martial arts literature, Liu turns elsewhere. He introduces 'only a few examples of critical uses of the lessons of martial arts today', but insists that the 'boundless political possibilities of critical martial arts are something we are only beginning to imagine now (16).
To find any of these, he has to look outside of China itself, and indeed, arguably, outside of and away from literature per se. As his formulation of the question reveals, Liu looks away from China and to 'the global citizen' when formulating the question itself:
What difference, then, does it make when we cease to view this form of literature as the stuff of cheaply produced B-list midnight movies and the window on the colonial psyche of the Chinese people, and instead begin to view it as a serious mode of social thought, as an intellectual resource of importance for contemporary theory and cultural practice from which all global citizens have something to learn? (15-16)
The question (re)introduces 'movies' and also 'global citizens' in what was ostensibly meant to be a question about literature. Consequently, the answer comes as an answer to a question about movies and international (non-Chinese or diasporic Chinese) people:
Inspired by Guattari and Deleuze's notion of 'minor literature', Meaghan Morris characterizes martial arts film as 'minor cinema' that serves as a critical pedagogical tool in the classroom for the study of class consciousness. While 'major cinema' is 'global' (difference-denying), 'minor cinema' is 'transnational' (community-building). For Morris, martial arts cinema is a historical example of how a minor cinema from a distant culture (Hong Kong) can reshape world culture through the preservation of spaces that are rapidly disappearing – urban slums, motels, buses, factories, and other 'any-space-whatever' filled with distressed futures and chronic dereliction and loss-against the apocalyptic, spectacular, U.S. patriotic ('saving the world') or global folkloric design of Hollywood's big-budget major cinema. (16)
So this is an answer about martial arts film, not literature. Moreover, it is arguably also an answer about something that is only 'minor' when viewed from a certain place and a certain perspective – one that might provocatively be characterized as having been constitutively blinded to the possibility that martial arts literature and film today in China and in Hong Kong are neither 'minor' nor 'not nationalising'. Martial arts may well still be 'minor' in the US and Europe. But in Hong Kong and China?
Then Liu turns to another academic treatment of the cultural and 'political' effects of martial arts film (not literature) during the 1970s:
Similarly, Vijay Prashad observes in an important book on Afro-Asian connections that, historically, martial arts culture has produced political solidarity and interracial cross-identification between oppressed peoples across the globe – a strange 'alliance between the Red Guard and the Black Panthers' from the Cultural Revolution in China to the Civil Rights movement in the States – that is otherwise unthinkable. What Prashad cleverly terms 'Kung Fusion' indicates a form of 'polycultural' communication that is distinct from the multiculturalist celebration of diversity (similar to Morris's distinction between the transnational and the global). Amy Abugo Ongiri argues that by recognizing the historical role played by kung fu visual icons in the formation of a Black aesthetic that she calls 'spectacular Blackness', and by recognizing the interconnections and dialogues between Asians and African Americans, we can refuse America's racial ideological landscape that constructs these communities as polar opposites in debates surrounding affirmative action and the model minority myth. (16)
Now, I do not disagree with any of this in and of itself. But the few evocations of certain readings of the significance of martial arts films on groups, communities, cultures and literacies around the world in the 1970s that Liu gives here are both a world away from literature and from China.
Perhaps this is because in the effort to set out his sophisticated and fascinating study of Chinese martial arts literature, Liu goes too far in the direction of constructing it as somehow free from the reactionary forces and historical processes that he sees as having militated against it throughout the 20th century. Or perhaps it is because such dramatic examples of 'polycultural' building cannot be found in the realms and registers of literature, compared to the proliferation of such examples around film. Or perhaps it is because the gravitational pull of issues of nationalism in and around both martial arts literature and film in and around China is something that has not only been produced by Western theorists, but also by Chinese literature, film and nationalism.
——— (2002). The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hunt, Leon (2003). Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger. London: Wallflower.
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