White Orientals and Martial Arts History
I have critiqued certain historical approaches to martial arts studies in the past. What is the basis of this critique, and what alternatives do I propose? I will look at this question here in terms of a reading of one or two aspects of Sylvia Shin Huey Chong's expansive book The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Chong 2012). I focus on this not least because Chong's study of race post-Vietnam focuses on relevant dimensions of some crucial historical moments and circuits in the constitution of the field of martial arts practice and discourse in the US to this day.
First, though: a note about 'history'. It is common sense to regard history as the ultimate referent: the name for the repository of every process and event and thing that happens. In this view, things happen and they are either noticed or unnoticed, either logged or unrecorded, as the known or unknown contents of history; and history moves forward. However, it is important to understand that history is never a simple neutral referent, nor is it always on a simple forward trajectory. Nor is it ever simply one thing.
When we say 'history' we may seem to be evoking one thing. But we are not. We are referring to something that is written, recorded, experienced, fantasized about, engaged with, hidden from, played and replayed, worked over, worked through, worked with. There is no sense in which 'history' is ever a complete, comprehensive, self-present, self-identical entity, identity or process. As with so many things, language tells us that it is a singular noun; but a moment's reflection suggests it is a complex, incomplete, slipping, sliding, spiralling, vertiginous array of processes, moving at different speeds and in different directions.
Moreover, historical processes are themselves part of other processes. They are always connected with operations that might be called, for simplicity, ideology. I use the word 'ideology' here deliberately: in everyday usage 'ideology' tends to be used to mean 'false belief'. It can also be used to evoke motivations, belief systems, visions and ideals (as in, 'the ideology of the Conservative Party' and 'the ideology of the Labour Party'). In some of the most 'radical' cultural theory, the word can be used to refer to something from which there is no escape, no outside, and no getting away from – i.e., something fundamental and constitutive of culture and society. So the term can be used to evoke every sense from 'most false' to 'most basic' element of humanity.
It is relevant here because I am going to attach it to the figure of Sylvester Stallone's character John Rambo in First Blood (1982) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).
Rambo is a kind of historical and an ideological figure, in several senses. In First Blood, Rambo was an abject character, a Vietnam War veteran turned drifter, whose rejection from mainstream society caused him to fight back against the police of a small town and wreak havoc. 'They drew first blood!' was his justification, hence the film's title. Moreover, Rambo moved the conflict out into the woods around the town – namely, into a terrain in which his special forces training meant that, as he puts it 'out here I am the law'.
First Blood is one of a range of 1980s films which on first glance purport to display the power and combat supremacy of US special forces. However, as Chong points out, these films exist in a complex relationship to what has to be understood as the trauma of the Vietnam War.
Thus, First Blood is a reworking of historical issues from the 1960s and early 1970s in 1980s visual culture. Moreover, it becomes clearly ideological in a number of ways with the sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II. This was the film about which President Ronald Reagan made the comment that it helped Americans to find a way to be proud of their involvement in Vietnam. In other words, it was a fantasy replaying of the war in which, as Rambo says in the film, 'we get to win this time'. It is also the film that most showcases Stallone's muscularity – something that film theorists and scholars of identity have remarked upon in terms of its relevance for signalling discursive changes in styles of masculinity. (It also signals discursive changes in martial arts masculinity.)
Accordingly, in all of these registers and more, 'ideology' is an apt term for thinking about what is happening with history.
Sylvia Chong's first end enduring point is that America was 'traumatised' in the Vietnam War. But, she asks: 'What might it mean to traumatize a nation? To borrow this diagnosis from psychology might seem to impose an unnatural unity upon the unruly collective known as the U.S. nation' (Chong 2012: loc 223). However, she argues, '
to analogize the nation as subject is not necessarily to adopt the organic unities of the body politic or the universalities of the Jungian collective unconscious or the "myth and symbol" school of American studies' (226). Rather, 'if the personification of the nation as a patient on the cultural critic's couch is to be more than mere poetic analogy, it must take into account the way poststructuralist psychoanalysis has fundamentally challenged the coherence of the subject' (226). Accordingly:
The modern nation, like the modern subject, must be understood as fundamentally split, historically and socially contingent, and incapable of complete self-presence or self-awareness. The nation becomes a 'subject' in my analysis only insofar as it is a fictive field within which the scenarios of the oriental obscene circulate and take on meaning. (231)
For Chong, the 'oriental' was 'obscene' in the Vietnam era because of the power of the visual signs of carnage, violence, destruction, abjection and otherness associated with it and articulated through it. The impact of visual images of the Vietnam War on America was traumatic, Chong argues. The emergence of Asian martial arts into the visual cultural realm during this time and against this backdrop of trauma should mean that we be resolutely 'wary of celebrations of martial arts as an essentially Third World cultural form that is inherently resistant to dominant formations of state and economic power' (2730).
One of the aesthetic productions of the overlapping emergence of Asian martial arts into US consciousness at the time of the Vietnam was Stallone's Rambo – along with, of course, Ralph Macchio's 'karate kid', and (earlier) Chuck Norris's various special forces characters. Thus, in addition to the 'mystical lore combining Buddhism and other Asian religions with the American counterculture' (2743), what is also to be acknowledged as present is 'the violence which such Asian bodies taught to Americans, a gestural vocabulary that retains an Asian cultural residue through periphery symbols: the use of Asian terminology, such as sensei or sifu for teacher, even when applied to non-Asians; costumes of white karate gi robes and kung fu outfits with Mandarin collars' (2741). But, with Stallone, Norris, Macchio, Seagal, Van Damme, and so on, 'what seems to disappear once the martial arts leave the screen is the specificity of the Asian body' (2741).
Of course, before all of these figures was Bruce Lee, and other important figures such as the Japanese actor Sonny Chiba. Chong argues that historically figures like Chiba 'do not serve as direct points of identification', but rather as 'conduits for this style of violence that flows through them and into the audience as kinetic energy' (2748). However, she contends, 'the one exception to this exclusion is the figure of Bruce Lee, whose persona offers further insight into just how this orientalized violence makes its way into American bodies without those bodies becoming overtly racialized as Asian' (2748):
The object of assimilation is not simply the static image of Lee, frozen in time on a movie poster, but rather a style of movement: the combination of choreography and cinematography that produced the dynamic images of bodily movements identifiable as Bruce Lee. (2768)
Film theorists may be interested in Chong's argument that '
Lee seems to provide an exemplary instance of the Deleuzian movement-image, since his star persona appears to be completely enmeshed with the mapping of his body moving through space onto the temporal medium of the cinema' (2770). But for our present purposes what is more important is idea that 'the Vietnam War shadows the movement-images of Bruce Lee as well, appearing on the edges of films like Enter the Dragon through Vietnam veteran characters such as Williams (Jim Kelly) and Roper (John Saxon), and emerging in the colonial settings and battles of his other films' (2774).
Chong undertakes chapters-long analyses of the racial and ethnic significance of the US love of Bruce Lee, but does so in order to think more fully about the logic and dynamics of what arose after him, in the form of the characters played by Norris and Stallone in the 1980s. But crucial at the Lee-stage of the discursive movement is that Lee managed to 'serve both as a metonym for the Chinese as a racialized group and also as an honorary white, a figure of masculine power who transcends his racialized status and is assimilated into existing structures of power' (3136).
Interestingly, she notes that, in many of the popular narratives about Lee's status vis-à-vis 'race' in the US, the stories always seem to involve Chinese racism – namely, the insularity of the Chinese kung fu community, the scandal of Lee teaching kung fu to non-Chinese, and so on. Thus, Chong points out, these stories 'locate racism in Chinese rather than in American culture and depict Lee as overcoming his own culture's xenophobia and thus becoming "American" in the process' (3178).
Moreover, something significant happens with post-Bruce Lee American films' tendencies to displace matters of race and ethnicity into the realm of either universal individualism or class. Assessing Davis Miller's (Miller 2000) account of Bruce Lee's place and function in his own life, Chong argues that 'Miller's move from mourning the death of the "bad old white boy" to being reborn through an identification with Bruce Lee is not simply about racial transcendence, but represents a reconfiguration of orientalness as a form of honorary whiteness, cleansed of its more troubling connotations' (3188).
Similarly, in the working class drama of No Retreat, No Surrender, '
the spirit of Lee is resurrected to restore the privileges of whiteness that Jason temporarily lost with the emasculation of his father' (3200). Interestingly, however:
the production history and subplots of No Retreat complicate the erasure of racial specificity that the film's narrative tries to perform. The film was directed by Corey Yuen and produced by Ng See-Yuen, two Hong Kong martial arts film luminaries and members of the Seven Little Fortunes, a Hong Kong performance troupe trained in Chinese opera acrobatics whose other illustrious members included Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. As a result it is difficult to dismiss No Retreat as simply an appropriation and whitening of Bruce Lee's legacy, when in fact the film serves as an early bridge for Chinese directors and actors to enter Hollywood… (3202)
Thus, Chong proposes that we can extend Meaghan Morris's argument that 'instead of seeing No Retreat, No Surrender as a Hong Kong rip-off passing as American, we can just as well say that it remade The Karate Kid for people who like Hong Kong films'. So: 'rather than viewing the film as simply Americanizing Bruce Lee as an honorary white pater familias, it might also orientalize Jason through his imagined relationship with Lee, whom he addresses as "Lee da ge" (big brother Lee)' (3206).
Indeed, Chong discusses a range of films in which cross-ethnic identification is unstable. But a crucial change occurs around Chuck Norris in the 1980s:
By 1986, when Norris is promoting his tenth film after Good Guys, Invasion U.S.A. (1985), Bruce Lee is no longer the main point of reference for his career. Instead, as another Los Angeles Times profile reveals, Norris is now the reincarnation of John Wayne, whose name is evoked four times on the first page alone, and Norris's films in the mold of 'modern-day Westerns'. (3293)
This is a significant transformation because, as Chong argues, it constitutes a kind of strong disavowal and distancing of identities, whereas before it was in a sense 'clear' that the special forces characters played by the likes of Norris and Stallone were not only produced in Vietnam, but also by Vietnam, as well as, cinematically, by Bruce Lee. Stallone's striated martial muscularity refers more to Bruce Lee's body than Schwarzenegger's Mr Olympia massiveness. Similarly, Norris's martial moves signal the cross-fertilization or even contamination of bodily capacities by East-West encounters. But the semiotic switch from Lee to Wayne signals a kind of backward pre-oriental reference in film:
From Bruce Lee to John Wayne – this reverse genealogy of the Hollywood action hero seems to undo the orientalization of the Vietnam veteran, replacing both the body incontinent of the traumatized soldier and the body mastered of the Asian martial artist with an earlier warrior figure more often associated with the violent oppression of racial difference on the edges of the U.S. nation-state. (3295)
Put differently: '
the soldier-heroes played by Chuck Norris, and later by Sylvester Stallone, represent a differently orientalized body, one neither fully traumatized nor invincible, but rather the condensation of both fantasies simultaneously' (3298). Both have an 'ostensibly white body whose origins are thoroughly oriental' (3299). Indeed, Chong asserts:
Norris's and Stallone's Vietnam heroes are white Orientals, performing a yellowface minstrelsy sans yellowface, in order to reinvigorate a whiteness that has lost both its hegemonic wholeness from the protests of the 1970s and its masculine vigor from the Vietnam War. But since the oriental source of this minstrelsy is phantasmatic to begin with, such a masquerade is ultimately less a theft of authentic Asian culture than a reflection of the original fantasy of the oriental obscene that produced such scenarios. (3309)
In such characters, their '
whiteness is shot through with otherness both in the form of its bodily comportment-fighting techniques borrowed straight from the mysterious ars violentiae of Asian martial arts-as well as its specular form, descended from the bloody naked torso of Bruce Lee, revealing its vulnerable embodiment as Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson never did' (3299).
This kind of analysis of the semiotic genealogy of what went on to be a supposedly thoroughly Americanized martial arts aesthetic reveals the ways in which history and ideology are ineradicably intertwined and produce aesthetics as much as conscious discourses. Although I have not had time to do any justice to Chong's complex historical discussions here, hopefully what I have focused on in her work suggests some of the ways in which historical analysis can be recruited to draw into focus the tectonic movements and interplays of forces that go into tracing the contours of different cultural-historical conjunctures.
References
Miller, Davis (2000). The Tao of Bruce Lee. London: Vintage.
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