![]() ![]() Ultimately, this academic study of martial arts offers a focal point for new understandings of cultural and social beliefs and of practice and agency. Ethnographies explored describe how the social body trains in martial arts and how martial arts are constructed in transnational training. Contributors explore several popular and highbrow cultural considerations, including the career of Bruce Lee, Chinese wuxia films, and Don DeLillo’s novel Running Dog. Three central aspects emerge from this book: martial arts as embodied fantasy, as a culturally embedded form of self-cultivation, and as a continuous process of identity formation. The book’s cutting-edge research includes ethnography and approaches from film, literature, performance, and theater studies. Most of the contributors to the volume are practitioners of the martial arts, and all are keenly aware that these traditions now exist in a transnational context. This landmark work provides a wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the traditional Asian martial arts. It does so in order to propose certain ways to think critically about acts of cultural ‘placing’.Ī wide-ranging scholarly consideration of the martial arts. This paper seeks to interrogate such appropriative impulses, and to examine them in terms offered by several approaches: Derridean deconstruction, Rey Chow’s (Benjaminian) take on ‘culture’, and a Rancièrean notion of ‘policing’. But in all of the discourses about him there remain strong drives to ‘place’ him or ‘claim’ him – whether for a place (America, Hong Kong, China, or the world), or a people (Americans, ‘Chinese everywhere’, the colonised subaltern, this or that ethnic minority), or a ‘style’ (Wing Chun Kung Fu, ‘American Freestyle Karate’, even MMA), or an ideology (‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, ‘New Age’, ‘Postmodern’). But he was born in San Francisco, raised in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and became a US citizen at eighteen… This multiple, moving, migrant status is not unique to Bruce Lee, of course. However, one question that constantly recurs is that of his ethno-national ‘cultural identity’: who owns Bruce Lee? China? Bruce Lee is after all ethnically Chinese and his first language was Cantonese. Of course, the facts of this matter are widely known: there is no mystery or controversy about the US passport that Bruce Lee held from the age of eighteen. This talk poses the question of Bruce Lee’s national identity. Talk given on 1st February 2016 at the China Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. By exposing the inherent contradictions within kung fu cinema and incorporating of combative action aesthetics derived from Bruce Lee’s martial arts philosophy and wing chun principles – what I call kuai (快 speed), hen (狠 brutality), and zhun (準 precision), the series presents new possibilities of wu and offers a more comprehensive understanding of Chinese kung fu. Despite kung fu cinema’s claim to ‘realism’ since its conception in the 1949, there is a strong suppression of wu (武 the martial) in the genre’s action aesthetics due to the elevation of wen (文 the literary and the artistic) in traditional Chinese culture. he used to be so much better.This article argues that Donnie Yen’s Ip Man series (2008-2015) synthesizes two predominant unarmed, hand-to-hand combat traditions of Hong Kong martial arts cinema – what I call zhenshi (真實 authenticity) and shizhan (實戰 combativity), represented by the series of kung fu films featuring Kwan Tak-hing as the legendary Wong Fei-hung and the martial arts action films of Bruce Lee respectively. Even in the Warlords, which he won best actor in the HK film awards. Jet Li's new movies are all really disappointing, imo. It's a noble story but the quality of the film was poor and the storyline wasn't carried out very well. yes everyone in that time period had to have that hairstyle or else death. The Hans originally kept their hair long because under Confucian belief, any harm or alteration of the body is against filial piety, something along the lines of hurting yourself is equivalent to hurting your parents. Later on, cutting off the braid would also be seen as a sign of treason that would also justify execution. It was imposed on the Han Chinese by the Manchurians as a form of submission to their rule and those who didn't shave their heads were executed. The history behind it is pretty interesting. ![]() The hairstyle is typical of the Qing Dynasty and is called the queue. I had question about Jet Li's hairstyle in Fearless and the China series, what was it called and was it realistic for almost every chinese man to have that hairstyle? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |