Anyone interested in histories of Hong Kong might enjoy this video about Kowloon Walled City which I've just watched on YouTube by architecture, design and urbanism vlogger Dami Lee. It's really insightful!
Monday 25 September 2023
Sunday 1 May 2022
A Positive Review of Fighting without Fighting
Library Journal has published a pre-publication review of my forthcoming book, Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West.
According to its author, Terry Bosky, "White’s scholarly take on Hollywood’s infatuation with kung fu offers multiple entry points for readers, from film historians to sociologists. Action film fans will come away with a deeper appreciation of these films, and an expanded watch list."
Sunday 27 March 2022
Appearance on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking
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| Bruce Lee strikes a pose in Enter the Dragon (1973) |
I've just recently taken part in a discussion of the impact and legacy of Bruce Lee and Enter The Dragon, to be broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3's arts/culture magazine programme Free Thinking on 29th March 2022. The discussion was hosted by Matthew Sweet, and the other guests were:
- Matthew Polly (who has written the authoritative biography of Bruce Lee)
- William Sin (who has produced some fascinating work re-exploring classic questions of ethics in Western philosophy through Chinese thought, including the philosophy of action we have in Bruce Lee films)
- Xine Yao (whose podcast 'PhDivas', about 'academia, culture and social justice', has also included a brilliant episode on Berry Gordy's Motown–kungfu mash-up The Last Dragon (1985))
During the programme, we discussed Lee's life and work, the impact of his films in American culture, the change in portrayals of Asian people within this, and the take-up of kung fu in Blaxploitation films and rap music, alongside questions of Lee's charisma and performance style, the ethical perspectives he offers on action, and his place in today's Hong Kong culture and identity.
Aside from that, I think that only other thing that I can say is that nunchaku were involved in the recording of this programme...
If you miss the programme, it will be available on BBC's iPlayer, and also through their 'Arts & Ideas' podcast.
For more information, please see their website here:
Sunday 27 February 2022
Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West
My forthcoming book, Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West (London: Reaktion, 2022), is due to be published in June, and is already available on pre-order.
It looks at the history and legacy of the "kung fu craze" which swept America, Europe, and the broader world, in 1973–4. It lays out the background of the craze in Hong Kong's long history of martial arts cinema, and in the growing awareness of martial arts amidst changing ideas of China (and "The East") in Western culture in the 1960s and 1970s. I trace the unfolding of the craze and discuss some of its most important films, and explore the ongoing significance of the kung fu phenomenon. In particular, I explore the ways that the arrival of Bruce Lee and kung fu was bound up in changing (and challenging) traditional identities, both as gendered and raced, during this tumultuous period. A final chapter considers the return of martial arts in twenty-first century wuxia films, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002) and The Grandmaster (2013). Throughout, I explore not just film history, but martial arts within a wider popular culture from rap music to kids' cartoons.
See the publisher's page here.
Or Amazon here.
It's got some very generous recommendations!:
‘Fans and scholars alike will relish Luke White's remarkable exploration of kung fu cinema's explosive rise in the "West" and its ongoing influence in international culture. Fighting without Fighting is the definitive book on the subject.’ — Matthew Polly, bestselling author of American Shaolin, Tapped Out, and Bruce Lee: A Life‘A comprehensive and exhilarating journey through the cultural history of “kung-fu fever”, showing how the Asian martial arts have permeated everything from Blaxploitation cinema and Hanna-Barbera cartoons to seventies disco tunes and Marvel comic books. White’s electric prose crackles with all the brio and rigour of a classic kung-fu throwdown.’ —Gary Bettinson, editor-in-chief of Asian Cinema and author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai‘This engagingly written book will be of great value for the scholars of kung fu cinema and martial arts aficionados seeking to expand their horizons about the development of the genre in the past five decades. White’s insightful and nuanced analysis not only helps us re-examine the enduring impact of the kung fu craze in the 1970s, but also rethink the key role that the genre plays in transnationalising cinema in the era of globalisation. With its inviting style, this work will enhance both film and martial arts studies collections.’ — Wayne K. T. Wong, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield‘In Fighting without Fighting, Luke White explores the origins of the 1970s "Kung Fu craze" in Chinese culture, the resonances of "Eastern" and oppressed heroes and heroines, and the ways in which their spectacular bodies were dramatised in innovative cinematography. He describes their impact on feminism, Black American cultures, music, videogames and renegotiations of masculinity, showing how an opening up to aspects of the "Oriental" revised and enriched mid-twentieth-century sensibilities, and how revisiting them enlightens contemporary debates on decolonisation. He traces influences and echoes in contemporary world cinema and speculative fictions, where the magical and mystical meet with politics of race, gender and empowerment. This amounts to an expert and ambitious narrative that spirals outwards from the advent of Kung Fu in ’70s Hong Kong and Hollywood to encompass a wide historical, geographic and ideological scope in which Bruce Lee is a persistent presence, and has the last word.’ — Barry Curtis, Professor at the University of the Arts, London, and author of Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film
Forthcoming essay: "Crippled Warriors: Masculinities and Martial Arts Media in Asia"
I have an essay coming out in a fascinating collection to be published this May (2022) by Routledge.
The book is edited by Youna Kim and is titled Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile.
My own contribution, "Crippled Warriors: Masculinities and Martial Arts Media in Asia," traces the recurrent image of the disabled, sick and mutilated martial artist's body across Asian martial arts media, but especially, of course, in Hong Kong cinema, as a means to explore changing experiences of masculinity in Asian culture. Amongst the films I discuss are the Zatoichi series, One-Armed Swordsman (1967), and the 2018 Indian action comedy Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota / The Man Who Feels No Pain.
You can find out more about the book on Routledge's website here: https://www.routledge.com/Media-in-Asia-Global-Digital-Gendered-and-Mobile/Kim/p/book/9780367672850
And it's also available to pre-order on Amazon.
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| Still from The Man Who Feels No Pain, 2018. |
Wednesday 29 April 2020
Legacies of the Drunken Master - book now out!
With a big fanfare...
(and after a long period of basically ignoring that I even have a blog!)
... my book, Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films is out from the University of Hawai'i Press, on April 30th 2020.
It primarily explores the politics of the performing body in the kung fu comedy genre that exploded in the wake of Jackie Chan's success in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both released in 1978). Starting from there, it explores a range of films from the zany Miracle Fighters films directed by the 'Yuen Clan' (Yuen Woo-ping and his brothers), through the kung fu cop comedies of Jackie Chan (Project A is my favourite!) and the 'hopping corpse' (jiangshi / geongsi) movies of the 1980s / 1990s to the more recent work of Stephen Chow, amongst others.
The comedy genre interested me in particular because it's often a somewhat critically overlooked and marginalised one, even in the study of Hong Kong cinema and martial arts films. It's often written about as trivial or as a retreat from the stormy idealism or existential rebellion involved in Chang Cheh's swordplay heroes of the late 1960s (e.g. The One Armed Swordsman) or Bruce Lee's anti-colonial Fist of Fury. A range of writers have seen it as marking a new accommodation to the hyper-flexibility required of individuals under globalised capitalism, as it was being pioneered in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. It was a time when the island entered a post-cultural revolution era and when, as Akbar Abbas argues, politics 'disappeared', and consumerism took its place. But my book really started with the question of whether there is more to the politics of these films than this. I'm somewhat enchanted by the incredible mobility of the acrobatic kung fu comedic body, and this seems to me an image full of utopian promise and potential.
It's a very 'theoretical' book, with each chapter starting out with a particular theme or issue surrounding the films, and a different theoretical approach. Chapters examine the genre through:
There's also a final chapter which traces the reappearance of 'Beggar So' – the 'drunken master' who teaches Jackie Chan the 'eight drunk immortals' style in The Drunken Master – in films through the 90s and into the 21st century. The book's conclusion thinks about the ways that the films address us as spectators (as ourselves 'inheritors' of the 'legacy of the drunken master') in our moment of globalised popular culture.
One of the ways that I think that kung fu comedy genre is quite interesting politically is through the ways that it was involved in the development and articulation of a specifically 'Hong Kong' identity, distinct from that of mainland China, and in doing so separated itself from some of the more 'nationalist' modes of imagining the self that were involved in the earlier, heroic kung fu films. In this much, even if it does not seem directly 'political' in nature, the genre could be located as part of a broader explosion of local popular culture that seems to have laid something of the resources of cultural identity that underpin the recent protests in Hong Kong.
The book is already available on pre-order from most online booksellers!
There's also an interview with me talking about the book on YouTube, here:
(and after a long period of basically ignoring that I even have a blog!)
... my book, Legacies of the Drunken Master: Politics of the Body in the Hong Kong Kung Fu Comedy Films is out from the University of Hawai'i Press, on April 30th 2020.
It primarily explores the politics of the performing body in the kung fu comedy genre that exploded in the wake of Jackie Chan's success in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both released in 1978). Starting from there, it explores a range of films from the zany Miracle Fighters films directed by the 'Yuen Clan' (Yuen Woo-ping and his brothers), through the kung fu cop comedies of Jackie Chan (Project A is my favourite!) and the 'hopping corpse' (jiangshi / geongsi) movies of the 1980s / 1990s to the more recent work of Stephen Chow, amongst others.
The comedy genre interested me in particular because it's often a somewhat critically overlooked and marginalised one, even in the study of Hong Kong cinema and martial arts films. It's often written about as trivial or as a retreat from the stormy idealism or existential rebellion involved in Chang Cheh's swordplay heroes of the late 1960s (e.g. The One Armed Swordsman) or Bruce Lee's anti-colonial Fist of Fury. A range of writers have seen it as marking a new accommodation to the hyper-flexibility required of individuals under globalised capitalism, as it was being pioneered in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. It was a time when the island entered a post-cultural revolution era and when, as Akbar Abbas argues, politics 'disappeared', and consumerism took its place. But my book really started with the question of whether there is more to the politics of these films than this. I'm somewhat enchanted by the incredible mobility of the acrobatic kung fu comedic body, and this seems to me an image full of utopian promise and potential.
It's a very 'theoretical' book, with each chapter starting out with a particular theme or issue surrounding the films, and a different theoretical approach. Chapters examine the genre through:
- an examination of its carnival qualities;
- its relation to the 'utopias of the body' discussed by Walter Benjamin;
- the way that violence is depicted in the films;
- a postcolonial application of feminist rereadings of Freud's notion of hysteria and the hysterical body;
- an examination of the thematics of masculinity.
There's also a final chapter which traces the reappearance of 'Beggar So' – the 'drunken master' who teaches Jackie Chan the 'eight drunk immortals' style in The Drunken Master – in films through the 90s and into the 21st century. The book's conclusion thinks about the ways that the films address us as spectators (as ourselves 'inheritors' of the 'legacy of the drunken master') in our moment of globalised popular culture.
One of the ways that I think that kung fu comedy genre is quite interesting politically is through the ways that it was involved in the development and articulation of a specifically 'Hong Kong' identity, distinct from that of mainland China, and in doing so separated itself from some of the more 'nationalist' modes of imagining the self that were involved in the earlier, heroic kung fu films. In this much, even if it does not seem directly 'political' in nature, the genre could be located as part of a broader explosion of local popular culture that seems to have laid something of the resources of cultural identity that underpin the recent protests in Hong Kong.
The book is already available on pre-order from most online booksellers!
There's also an interview with me talking about the book on YouTube, here:
Thursday 21 December 2017
Toward an Aesthetic of Weightlessness: Qinggong and Wire-fu"
A while back I contributed an essay for the catalogue of artist susan pui san lok's exhibition, at Derby Quad, entitled "ROCH Fans and Legends." Susan's work in the exhibition works with video footage, primarily found on fan sites, to explore the cultural translations of Jin Yong's famous wuxia ("swordplay") novels as they migrate across cinematic and televisual cultures and transnational sites of reception and fandom. Doing this, the work also provides a meditation on forms of diasporic cultural identity, and the transnationality of popular culture.
My essay ("Toward an Aesthetic of Weightlessness: Qinggong and Wire-fu")looked at the figure of the weightless body in wuxia wirework, seeking to understand some of the differences between this and the muscular bodies of the "classic" kung fu films of the 1970s.
The catalogue is now available as an ebook, available here:
https://spsl-studio.com/roch-fans/rochfansandlegendsfreeebook/
The book is a really fascinating, rich, multimedia product – a work of art in itself – which pushes the medium to its limits.
As well as giving a much better account of Susan's work than I can in this brief post, it also includes essays by Alice Ming-Wai Jim (University of Concordia, Montreal), Jean Hui Ng (Research Curator, CFCCA), Marquard Smith (Piet Zwart institute, Netherlands / UCL, London), Henry Tsang (Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver), Andy Willis (University of Salford, Manchester) and Wayne Wong (University of Hong Kong / Kings, University College London).
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