Martial Arts and Media Supplements

I was recently asked to write an afterword to a collection on Martial Arts and Media Culture. What follows is my first draft. You can download the PDF here.

Martial Arts and Media Supplements

  

In his intricate elaboration of the rationale for the collection Martial Arts and Media Culture, Tim Trausch seeks to focus our gaze on the martial arts mediascape, to perceive the play and drift of the transfer across different media of the key coordinates of 'martial arts' as a contemporary cultural discourse: images, signs, tropes, conventions, clichés, and of course innovations, interminglings and hybridizations, moving from one media to another, across geographical, linguistic, generic and other borders. This kind of attention strikes me as a prime example of an approach that Rey Chow theorised in her 1995 essay, 'Film as Ethnography; or, Translation between Cultures in the Postcolonial World' (Chow 1995). In that essay, Chow advanced both a theory and a method that she proposed any scholar of film, cultural, media or literary studies concerned with questions of cultural crossovers or cultural translation should take on board.

To develop it, Chow reads (among other things) Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Task of the Translator' (Benjamin 1999) with a view to instituting premises and protocols of cultural analysis that grasp from the outset the extent to which 'translation between cultures' already takes place, a great deal of the time, in our 'postmodern', media-saturated 'postcolonial world'. Crucially, Chow proposes that 'translation between cultures' takes place not simply (nor even primarily) by way of conscious (or) linguistic translation. Rather, cultural translation, in the sense Chow conceives it, proceeds by way of the movement across borders and from context to context and media to media of material objects, commodities, techniques, technologies and practices. She does this 'in order to highlight the problems of cross-cultural exchange – especially in regard to the commodified, technologized image – in the postcolonial, postmodern age' (Chow 1995: 182).

When it comes to the question of the relations between martial arts and media culture, this kind of approach is arguably not merely desirable, but necessary. For, in the (notional) West, at least, and accelerating exponentially throughout the twentieth century, 'martial arts' have arguably always been both mediatized and overwhelmingly represented as 'Asian' (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011). Their emergence and proliferation throughout the twentieth century was always bound up with their media representations, and these overwhelmingly tended to make at least some reference to their putatively 'Asian origins' or 'character'. Indeed (and although there may be exceptions), it seems reasonable to propose, at the outset, that in many cases, and certainly for most practitioners (other than, say, police, security and military personal), media representations of martial arts came first, and that these representations very often involved reference to 'Asia'.[1]

However, there is more to the global spread of 'Asian martial arts' than a simple anticipatory structure of orientalist desire. That is to say, there is more to this than seeing then wanting then doing. For if we consider the global dissemination of what we might term for convenience 'East Asian martial arts', one thing to note would be everything else that is carried, transported and transferred along with them. Asian martial arts bring with them modified worldviews, outlooks, philosophies, ideologies, exercise principles, posture modifications, dietary considerations, lifestyle changes, sartorial choices, ethical norms, aesthetic tastes, cultural and intellectual interests, and so on. In fact, so much 'baggage' comes along with Asian martial arts, that it is effectively impossible to disambiguate the primary from the secondary, the essential from the add-on, or the inside from the outside. Inevitably, therefore, the question that often arises among academics is one of what we are even referring to when we refer to martial arts or when we evoke the movement of East Asian martial arts to the West (see the discussion of this in Chan 2000).

I do not want to get into the positivistic and scientistic debate about how to define martial arts. I'm happy to leave this to all of the many scholars who seem to think that academic study demands that they plough all of their efforts into the taxonomic and judgemental labours of deciding what is in and what is out, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. Rather than this, and because 'martial arts' is always essentially a discursive construct, it seems to me better to explore the ways that martial arts are constructed in discourse – the ways they are evoked, tacitly understood, recognised, represented, talked about, fantasized, stereotyped; the ways practitioners self-identify, how they dis-identify and differentiate; what it is that fans or practitioners are fans or practitioners of; and so on. From such a perspective, it seems reasonable to suggest that when people say 'martial arts' they tend to think of a relatively limited range of images: either of people, wearing something like white or black pyjamas, in training halls, practicing punches, kicks, holds and throws, or intelligible or inscrutable movements; or of the dramatized representation of skilled fighters in action film, comic book or computer game contexts. Between these two realms – between the one we might witness or experience at the local sports centre and the one we might witness and experience on TV – I would argue that people tend to regard the former (the lived practice) as 'primary', 'real', 'true' or 'actual', and therefore to think of the specific scenarios of people training, or trained people fighting, as being the principal object or referent 'martial arts'. The common belief might therefore be formulated like this: that martial arts reside immanently as skills and propensities within trained people and that they are revealed or actualised only in certain spectacles, such as fights (dramatized, sporting or spontaneous), or when people train (practice, repeat, reiterate, explore and experiment) in self-defined martial arts movements, techniques and principles, in pedagogical environments and relationships.

I indulge in such generalising statements not in order to legislate or adjudicate on anything, but rather to show why the types of complex, material, technological, textual and often deconstructive approaches of scholars like Chow (in a different context) and Trausch (in this one), along with many of the contributors to Martial Arts and Media Culture, can help us to move on from simple schemas like Eastern versus Western, past versus present, or the inside versus the outside of 'martial arts'.

As I hope to clarify, 'martial arts' cannot actually be neatly circumscribed or demarcated. (Nor does this matter – although showing how and why we should move on from this discussion is an important and consequential matter.) As mentioned, from the beginning, if we evoke the global spread of East Asian martial arts such as judo,[2] taekwondo and styles of karate and kung fu, then we inevitably evoke much more than the spread of specific training techniques, practices and skills, in isolation. Rather, the movement of the practices went hand in hand with the movement of clusters of ideas, values, ideologies, and myriad material objects, either directly or indirectly associated with martial arts – whether taking the form of a taste for green tea or kimchi, meditation or wuxia pian in film or literary tastes, as well as different sartorial, fashion, design and other aesthetic and lifestyle choices, from haircuts to tattoos to ways of speaking to comportment to demeanour.

Moreover, if we organise our thinking according to the terms of the familiar import/export or 'movement' narrative, in which East Asian martial arts were 'exported' to the West – or 'Eastern things' moved West – then we should be aware of the possibility that there were at least two other attendant movements – and that these movements were not simple or unidirectional transfers. Rather, these transfers must also have involved transformations. For, first, as mentioned, other things also moved West, along with 'martial arts'. Second, correspondingly, things moved (transformed) in the West. Such movement/change can be regarded as both precondition and consequence of the importation, adoption or appropriation of 'East Asian martial arts' in the West (see Krug 2001; Barrowman 2015). For, as poststructuralist political theorists would say, we must enquire into the 'conditions of possibility' of any event or situation.

What conditions of possibility enabled the emergence of such things as Chinese or Japanese martial arts classes in the West? One of the key ingredients for the possibility of the emergence of martial arts classes in the West was the prior circulation of images and ideas. The idea of doing karate or kung fu came first, for most non-military Westerners. And such ideas always come from images – media images; images in newspapers, images of exotic Asia, images in comic books, travellers' tales, war stories, serials and novels, such as the massively influential Sherlock Holmes serials, for instance.

The two themes I have so far picked out – the primacy of the image and the inextricability of 'martial arts' from their entanglement in clusters of putatively peripheral objects, practices and values – can be approached fruitfully according to some of the arguments offered by Jacques Derrida. The two most relevant aspects of Derrida's thought for approaching martial arts and (or within) media culture are his intertwined arguments about what he called supplementarity and the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1976, 2001, 1982). These are relevant in terms of this discussion of martial arts because, although we tend to prioritise and hierarchize in terms of what Derrida regarded as our ('metaphysical') presuppositions or ('metaphysical') biases – in which we place living, embodied presence first, and non-living, non-embodied non-presence second (or last) – it often turns out on closer analysis that the things we had deemed secondary, derived, supplementary or inferior are in fact strangely primary. Think here of all of the things 'around' martial arts that we so easily regard as 'peripheral', inessential, extra, added-on – or, in other words, supplementary. Where would we be without them? They constantly refer to, evoke, conjure up, allude to something else, some other essence or entity, somewhere else: martial arts. Martial arts paraphernalia constantly refers away from itself, to that certain something else, somewhere else, that thing that really is 'martial arts'. But if we try to look for this essence, this evoked essential entity, we can never seem to find it. It's always somewhere else. Even one instance or example of it is not fully or truly or decisively 'it'. Derrida famously called this effect différance.

Différance is even active in what we might like to think of as reality. In other words, it's not just martial arts paraphernalia and quirky consumer goods that incessantly refer away from themselves to the elsewhere and elsewhen of some true essence and identity of martial arts. Différance is also active in the realms of actually-existing martial arts practices themselves. This or that dojo refers incessantly to Japan, this taiji class refers relentlessly to China. But which or where or when 'Japan', and which or where or when 'China'? This martial arts style or club or that martial arts practice does not seem to encapsulate or cover everything that seems essential or proper to 'martial arts'. But they allude to it, they try to approach it, to actualise it. Yet, what is the 'it'? It's never quite there and never quite that.

This is the very definition of différance. Mostly, rather than a referent, a sense of a 'spirit' is conjured up: spectres of Funakoshi haunt us, spirits of Zhang Sanfeng inspire us, and so on and so forth (see Derrida 1994). In other words, always absent presences are conjured up in the rituals, rhetorics, concepts, imaginings, objects, evocations, terms, and other paraphernalia of the practices. But more than this, it is surely even the case that any one dimension of the cluster of practices only ever refers to the others, needs the others, and none can ever, in and of itself, amount to the essence of the practice, entity or identity. At this point, everything starts to seem secondary, supplementary, peripheral, partial, incomplete…. This is why critics of deconstruction argue that it is problematic to follow such styles of thinking all the way down: because it seems to make everything impossible. However, this is a nihilistic way of relating to deconstruction, because, rather than denying things, deconstruction merely insists upon the supplementarity of things – their constructedness, the contingency of their constructedness, and hence the potential for transformation and change in all things. In this sense, deconstruction is essentially optimistic and always interested in constructive change. As Derrida once put it:

All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes micro-stabilizations), this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that there is a need for stability. Now, this chaos and instability, which is fundamental, founding and irreducible, is at once naturally the worst against which we struggle with laws, rules, conventions, politics and provisional hegemony, but at the same time it is a chance, a chance to change, to destabilize. If there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural, essential or substantial, that politics exists and ethics is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a chance, and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other. (Derrida 1996: 84)

At the very least, deconstructive interrogation is useful to the extent that it asks us to challenge, test and sharpen the otherwise rough and ready hierarchies that it is easy too come up with, and so easy to be led by in our thinking. This is relevant here because, as I have been suggesting, it is all too easy to assume that when we say 'martial arts' we are primarily referring to the living embodied formal pedagogical practices of conscious, living, striving human beings. To think like this is fine, in one sense. But the problem with such an assumption is that it necessarily carries the implication that therefore we are not referring to computer games, fictions, cuddly toys or comedy caricatures. We may regard our image of the proper practice as primary and most of the paraphernalia that goes around it as secondary, derived, inferior. Obviously, we assign some of the 'paraphernalia' a different status: training swords, staffs and other weapons, punch bags, kick shields, sparring mitts and so on are clearly proper to the proper object or practice. Toy swords, foam nunchakus, and inflatable Kung Fu Panda punch bags, on the other hand, are clearly not proper to (nor the proper property of) the proper object or practice.

Again, I am aware that these more or less deconstructive formulations around the idea of what is proper and what is improper to, or the property of something may sound convoluted.[3] But again I want to propose that ultimately they can help us to see further and more clearly, because thinking along such lines asks to examine what we deem to be proper or primary to an object, field or practice, and what we conversely deem to be improper, secondary, derived, and inferior, or indeed a digression, perversion or aberration away from the proper (Bowman 2001). Asking this question helps to reveal both our own and others' values, biases and orientations more clearly. To my mind, this is one of the virtues and values of Martial Arts and Media Culture. Its contributions should certainly help to pressurise or inspire scholars of martial arts culture to interrogate their own premises or presumptions about what is proper and what is improper to the field, or what is inside and what is outside of martial arts.

However, despite what Tim Trausch writes in his editorial introduction, the project that this book contributes to is far from finished, or even decided. For, quoting my own contention in my editorial to the 2014 special issue of JOMEC Journal, which focused on 'Martial Arts Studies', in which I stated that there is a 'tendency for academic work to subordinate or exclude the media supplement in studies of martial arts', Trausch proposes that this tendency 'has rightfully been pointed out and tackled in martial arts studies'. Unfortunately, I would disagree, and instead repeat that there will long be a need to draw attention to 'media supplements' in studies of martial arts practices and discourses. This is because many of the disciplinary fields within which scholars operate and carry out studies of different aspects of martial arts remain 'metaphysical' in Derrida's sense – that is, subject-centred, often 'Cartesian', and quick to move on from the complicating dimensions that the media supplement threatens to introduce into any study of martial arts culture. So this is a perspective that remains worth reiterating, repeating, and insisting upon. Indeed, without impressing upon people the strength of these arguments time and again, 'media studies' and 'cultural studies' will always remain consigned to the status of being regarded as second-class academic citizens: secondary, derived and supplementary subjects themselves; not serious subjects, neither proper subjects, nor fields in which proper things are studied properly (Hall 2002; Hall and Birchall 2006; Hall 1992; Bowman 2003, 2008, 2007). Not sociology, not history, not psychology, not politics, not economics, not anthropology – media and cultural studies have long been cast as 'Mickey Mouse subjects'.

Much as we may baulk at the accusation of being a 'Mickey Mouse' subject, the best response of media and cultural studies is not to deny it or disavow Disney or animation, or Hollywood, the cinema, enjoyment, playfulness, fantasy, childhood or childishness, capitalism, consumerism or cuddly toys. It is rather to embrace the accusation and to argue unequivocally for the importance and power of all the 'Mickey Mouse supplements' that we study. For they are everywhere and they are both big business and transformative of many things, including societies, histories, individual and group psychologies, politics, economies, and all manner of anthropological areas. To pluck just a few examples from the air: We know that Bruce Lee films are responsible for the global proliferation of wing chun, just as we know that they are equally responsible for the recent revisionist filmic hagiographies of Ip Man (Bowman 2013). We know that the 1982 film The Shaolin Temple was directly responsible for a massive and immediate increase in international tourism to the Shaolin Temple and other areas in China.[4] And so on…

In fact, it is easy to point to example after example of films intervening into – and even dramatically changing – other areas of reality, in all sorts of ways. My personal favourite example remains the 'rediscovery' – in actual fact, the complete invention – of a new 'ancient' martial art in China, right after two key events: first, the massive international success of the Disney animation Mulan; and second, the Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong, the suppression of its practice and the arrest of many practitioners (see Palmer 2007). As Adam Frank notes in his study of taijiquan in Shanghai (Frank 2006), after the crackdown on Falun Gong, hundreds and hundreds of a hitherto unknown art called Mulanquan were literally bussed into Shanghai and other cities in China to perform mulanquan in the public parks, as they would otherwise have been empty, having been evacuated of qigong and Falun Gong practitioners by the police (I discuss this more fully in Bowman 2015).

The impact of a media text is massive here. The choice of Mulan as a name of the simulated and ersatz martial art of mulanquan is telling. For, it strongly suggests a deliberate Chinese state attempt to cash in on the success of the orientalist Hollywood film, by supplying the demand it sparked in potential Western tourists for a new/ancient 'feminist' and hyper-oriental(ist) practice. Furthermore, the very fact that there was a perceived need – or strategic value – in ensuring the continued presence of a certain style or aesthetic of martial arts practice in China's parks speaks volumes too. (As Adam Frank argues, the aesthetic of taijiquan appears to have been elevated to the very symbol of Chineseness – a key part of the 'brand', that puts a new slant on the meaning of the 'PR' in 'PRC'.) Clearly, martial arts fictions, fantasies, simulations and simulacra are big business; they impact on policies of all orders – not just Chinese policies, but those of other countries, more and more of which have begun to elevate their 'indigenous' martial arts to 'national sport' or 'national treasure' status, following the lead set by UNESCO, with its attributions of 'intangible cultural heritage' to practices like wing chun kung fu in Hong Kong, and so on.[5]

From this perspective, it is apparent that we have hardly begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities of media-focused martial arts research. Martial Arts and Media Culture adds to the exploration and examination of martial arts as they exist within and across some, but not all, contemporary media texts and technologies, and its chapters unearth several rich seams and reserves of martial arts tropology that permeate and even orientate key dimensions of contemporary transnational media culture. But there is more to do. There is much that could be built on the foundations of research and analysis that works like this book contribute to. 

To reverse the terms of my earlier criticism (the one Tim Trausch quoted in his editorial introduction) – one problem with the orientations of current scholarship across the different disciplines is not just that, as discussed earlier, anthropological, sociological, ethnographic, and psychological studies of martial arts too often ignore, downplay or exclude the media supplement. The obverse of this situation is equally problematic – namely, the fact that film, TV, gaming and other media studies scholars are not prepared to take the leap out of a text-focused disciplinary discourse and into an exploration of the implications and consequences of their text- and technology-focused studies and insights in other contexts, such as bodily lived practices, social relations, para-textual ideological constructions, embodied martial arts practice, and so on. In a world in which cosplay and battle re-enactment enthusiasts have begun to research, study and develop discourses around such matters as how to use Jedi weapons like the light sabre properly, there is clearly room – and obvious starting points, staging posts, or gateways – for media studies to leap across and to become new and other forms of cultural studies.

But there is a reluctance to do so. The people who are looking into cosplay martial arts from academic perspectives are currently less likely to be media studies researchers than they are to hail from disciplines such as history, dance or theatre studies, or scholars and hobbyists with a focus on such topics as historical European martial arts (HEMA). But such innovations are opportunities, linking points, potential bridges, between the supposedly discrete realms of media and body, or between textuality and corporeality. As such, they are crying out for the attention of creative thinkers, experts, researchers, scholars and analysts of media.

In other words, the situation remains the same as it was when I proposed – as a call to arms – in my 2014 journal issue editorial: that if film, media and cultural studies scholars do not jump into this new field, then it will be hegemonized by approaches that more than likely still want to downplay or exclude the media supplement. By this I mean approaches that are limited by the absence of, and that often even actively militate against any kind of deconstructive, media or cultural studies paradigm or approach.

The key question is why there is such reluctance – even palpable resistance – to crossing such boundaries as those between media and other forms of embodied practices. Just as I have so often complained that sociological studies of martial arts rarely venture seriously into the realm of the film and media that are obviously at the origin and heart of martial artists' fantasies and orientations, so the reverse is also true: martial arts film studies rarely ventures into sociology. Forces of resistance are evidently active on both sides of the divide. Accordingly, we should give the divide itself some serious attention. For, what is the divide between, say, film studies and sociology, anthropology or psychology? It is a divide between disciplines. It is a disciplinary divide. This is why scholars are reluctant to traverse it: they have been disciplined in quite particular ways. As disciplinary subjects, they want to stay where they know that they know what they know and where they know how to find out and how to know what they don't yet know. This is what disciplines give us, and make us: ways of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being. Different disciplines do things differently. Crossing into a new field is always a new beginning; starting from scratch. Few of us have the patience, time, humility, or even desire to take such steps. Even the self-declared 'nomads' that certain academics valorize seem to do little other than mooch around in philosophy circles talking about how the world is exactly the way Deleuze and Guattari said it was.

True interdisciplinarity has long been understood by theorists and those who have attempted to do it as being genuinely conflictual, and often conflicted (Mowitt 1992, 2003; Bowman 2003, 2007, 2008a). Academics and researchers cannot simply traverse disciplines the way that bits and pieces of Bruce Lee imagery, signs, ideas and tropes can traverse multiple texts and technologies in almost any media, region or language of the world. The movement of academics across fields is not quite like the movement of martial arts across media – even if the movement of some academic points and perspectives may have similar abilities to travel (and translate): bits and pieces, fragments, terms, concepts, can be picked up and redeployed in multiple contexts. Just think of the afterlives of once-critical/theoretical terms, like text, discourse, postmodernism or, indeed, deconstruction. All of these words have had precise academic formulations in certain texts, and such terms and their meanings have been picked up, fleshed out, contested, expanded or contracted, modified and transformed, in various academic fields. Some have proved suggestive in other contexts – from journalism to cultural commentary, photography, dance or even more distant disciplines and fields; or, indeed, with words like 'deconstruction', in culinary conversations and cookery programmes (where we now have dishes like 'deconstructed apple pie', and so forth).

This suggests that the fruits of academic labours may indeed traverse myriad regions and realms. However, the form and direction of that movement is outside of the control of intentional agents (such as the nuncupators, neologists or theorists of the terms that travel). Moreover, their movement from one context to another and one medium to another inevitably involves transformations, both in the meaning of the term and in the context of its deployment. (I am absolutely certain that Derrida would never have intended or accepted that 'deconstruction' could to refer to a dessert served inside out, for instance.)

Nonetheless, it seems likely that one of the reasons why terms like text, discourse, postmodernism, and deconstruction caught on in so many ways and in so many places is that they seemed useful and appropriate in helping to conceptualise and describe things. One of the things such terms help us to grasp and express is precisely the fragmented and porous character of contexts in a media saturated (postmodern) world. This is doubtless why – even though disciplines still have fights at and about their boundaries – we currently seem to be living through the effects of the deconstruction of the erstwhile hermetically sealed or at least well policed and sacrosanct borders of academic disciplines. People now talk about disciplines, like many other parts of life, as being more 'fluid' or 'liquid'. Some have proposed that we are now fully moving into an era of 'post-disciplinarity'.

'New' media technologies are clearly prime movers in some of this disciplinary deconstruction. The emergence of para-academic blogs, for instance, such as Ben Judkins' hugely popular Kung Fu Tea (which has been publishing since 2012 at chinesemartialstudies.com), and a few others, including perhaps my own martial arts studies blog, have been key in drawing together both academic and non-academic researchers from multiple fields and disciplines in remarkably convivial and collegial discussions about martial arts and how to study them. So, whereas before the era of such blogs, academics would operate in more isolated academic islands, today it seems hard not to perceive what others are doing. And perhaps because the institution of the blog always stands midway between 'proper' academic scholarship and 'personal opinion', more readers seem more prepared to read more open-mindedly, for curiosity and pleasure. Hence such blogs have helped to generate a new sense of community. In the emerging field(s) of martial arts studies, disciplinary differences that might otherwise have precipitated antagonisms and passionate disagreements seem currently to be taking a back-seat to the shared interest in, love of or fascination with all aspects of martial arts – whether 'proper' and 'primary' or 'improper' and 'peripheral'.

Perhaps this is because of the newness of the field. Or perhaps it is because of the obvious consensus around what is meant by 'martial arts', despite the impossibility of defining them rigorously, and despite the persistence of so much scholarship that will always try to define, demarcate, hierarchize and legislate on what martial arts are and what they are not. For, despite such orientations, we all just feel that we know what martial arts are and what martial arts stuff is. There is, to use Raymond Williams' term, a structure of feeling around martial arts in media culture; or, as many academics now prefer to say, economies or fields or structures of affect. Martial arts have many manifestations within shifting and multiple discursive formations. And as the contributions to this collection help us to see, we understand the terms and we recognise the manifestations because there are regularities and repetitions, serial structures[6] and more or less predictable forms and contents, albeit often combined with newness, innovation, hybridisation and unpredictable aspects, in all of the iterations of martial arts signs, symbols, supplements, tropes, signatures, events and contexts, across the multiple institutions and discourses that supplement and are supplemented by martial arts in media culture.

 

References

Barrowman, K. (2015), 'History in the Making: Martial Arts between Planet Hollywood and Planet Hong Kong', Martial Arts Studies (1):72-82. doi: 10.18573/j.2015.10020.

Benjamin, W. (1999), Illuminations, London: Pimlico.

Bowman, P. (2001), 'Proper Impropriety: The Proper-Ties of Cultural Studies', parallax no. 7 (2):50-65.

——— (2003), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics, and Practice, London; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press.

——— (2007), Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

——— (2008), Deconstructing Popular Culture, Basingstoke England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

——— (2008a), 'Alterdisciplinarity', Culture, Theory and Critique no. Vol. 49 (1):93-110.

——— (2013), Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Philosophy and Popular Culture, London and New York: Wallflower Press.

——— (2015), Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries, London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Chan, S. (2000), 'The Construction and Export of Culture as Artefact: The Case of Japanese Martial Arts', Body & Society no. 6 (1):69-74.

Chong, S. S. H. (2012), The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era, Durham: Duke University Press.

Chow, R. (1995), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Film and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. (1976), Of Grammatology, Baltimore ; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

——— (1982), Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester.

——— (1994), Specters of Marx : The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York ; London: Routledge.

——— (1996), "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism." In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by C. Mouffe. London: Routledge.

——— (2001), Writing and Difference, London: Routledge.

Farrer, D. S., and J. Whalen-Bridge (2011), "Introduction: Martial Arts, Transnationalism, and Embodied Knowledge." In Martial Arts as Embodied Knowledge: Asian Traditions in a Transnational World, edited by D. S. Farrer and J. Whalen-Bridge, 1-28. Albany: SUNY Press.

Frank, A. (2006), Taijiquan and the Search for the Little Old Chinese Man: Understanding Identity through Martial Arts, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, G. (2002), Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory, London: Continuum.

Hall, G., and C. Birchall (2006), New Cultural Studies : Adventures in Theory, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press ; Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.

Hall, S. (1992), "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies." In Cultural Studies, edited by C. N. a. P. T. Lawrence Grossberg, 277-294. New York and London: Routledge.

Krug, G. J. (2001), 'At the Feet of the Master: Three Stages in the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate into Anglo-American Culture', Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies no. 1 (4):395-410.

Law, M. (2008), The Pyjama Game: A Journey into Judo, London: Aurum Press.

Mayer, R. (2013), 'Machinic Fu Manchu. Popular Seriality and the Logic of Spread', Journal of Narrative Theory no. 43 (2):186-217.

——— (2014), Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mowitt, J. (1992), Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, Durham and London: Duke.

——— (2003), "Cultural Studies, in Theory." In Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics, and Practice, edited by P. Bowman. London: Pluto Press.

Palmer, D. A. (2007), Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China, [Kindle Edition] London: Hurst & Co. in association with the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris.

 

Notes

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[1] Such reference of course neither essential nor eternal. Even quite quickly after the demise of Bruce Lee and the first 'kung fu craze' of the 1970s, Western martial artists and actors began more and more to disassociate themselves and their representations from 'Asia'. Sylvia Chong, for instance, give the exemplary example of Chuck Norris, who moved from discussing his films in terms of Asian martial arts towards discussing them in terms of the tradition of John Wayne movies (Chong 2012; Krug 2001; Bowman 2015).

[2] Judo, however, was a very 'Westernized' innovation from its inception, at least to the extent that its founder both studied and advocated Western(ising) and modernizing principles in its development (Law 2008).

[3] In another context and with another focus I have written about the determination of senses and values of propriety and impropriety at length before (Bowman 2001).

[4] For information about this connection and also for the information that guides my comments on both UNESCO and Chinese government policies in the paragraphs that follow, I am indebted to Dr. Su Xiaoyan's paper, 'Reconstruction of tradition: modernity, tourism and Shaolin martial arts in the Shaolin Scenic Area, China', which was presented at the conference Traditional Martial Arts and Sports in Asia, in the Taekwondowon, Muju, South Korea, in November 2015. The paper is forthcoming in The International Journal of the History of Sport in 2016.

[5] For a comprehensive discussion, see Su, forthcoming.

[6]  For fascinating work on the force of 'seriality' in modern culture, see the work of Ruth Mayer (Mayer 2014, 2013).