(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:
