From Linear History to Discursive Constellation

This chapter argues that any attempt to construct a linear history of martial arts in media and popular culture as it exploded after the 1970s cannot but fail. The sheer proliferation of martial arts images, themes, texts, and practices precludes easy linear narrativization. Accordingly, Chapter 5 argues for the need to move ‘From Linear History to Discursive Constellation’ in our approach to martial arts in media and popular culture. The chapter attempts to establish the main discursive contours that appeared and developed through the 1980s—a decade in which ninjas and Shaolin monks explode onto the cultural landscape. This is followed by attention to the 1990s, in which three major events took place in the same year: the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the Wu-Tang Clan’s release of their enormously popular album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and the appearance on children’s television screens around the world of ‘The Power Rangers’—all of which took place in 1993. The chapter then attempts to track the major discursive tendencies and contours of martial arts aesthetics through the first decade of the twenty-first century, up to the mainstreaming of combat sports in more recent years.

Conceptual Foundations

Chapter 1 starts by interrogating the Oxford English Dictionary’s treatment of the term ‘martial arts’ as a way to broach the book’s concerns. Today, the idea that the term ‘martial arts’ is associated with practices that are ‘mainly of East Asian origin’ is contentious. But this chapter sets out how and why these connotations emerged. It goes on to deepen the case for the relationship between history and analysis within this work, to set out the core argument about the cultural power of media representation, and to lay out the ways in which its ensuing chapters will support the argument that ‘martial arts’ is a recently invented, variegated, and variable ‘discursive entity’.

Conclusion

This conclusion reflects on the previous chapters and on the status of martial arts as both an organizing term and a discursive entity. Martial arts is a considerably less stable entity than many practitioners are either led or want to believe. The conclusion discusses what dynamics, forces, agents, and agencies work for and against change; what factors work to produce stabilities, and what generate change. If martial arts was invented in modern media culture, and if change is inevitable, what does this suggest about the longevity of the term, concept, set of associations, connotations, and indeed lived, embodied, and institutionalized practices? The conclusion speculates on the possible future modifications and transformations of the field, away from its current forms, contents, and orientations.

Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing

Key among influential texts in the movement of martial arts texts into popular consciousness is the 1974 international hit disco song, ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas. Chapter 4, ‘Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing: Inventing Popular Martial Arts Aesthetics’ consists of a sustained close reading of this song, focusing on its lyrics, its aural and visual semiotics, its intertextual relations with other sound effects and songs, and some controversial instances of its reiteration and redeployment in different cultural contexts. Following the main questions that arise about this song in journalistic contexts, news stories, and conversations online, the chapter poses the well-worn question, ‘Is it racist?’ In doing so, the chapter enters into debates about orientalism, ethnic stereotyping, and cultural appropriation, but does so in a way that recasts the orientations of these debates, away from moralism and judgmentalism and towards questions of interest, desire, investment in, and involvement or encounters with ‘other cultures’.

I Want My TKD

Chapter 7 picks up the idea of the fragmentariness of contemporary media culture in examining martial arts in music videos. Called ‘I want my TKD: Martial Arts in Music Videos’, this chapter is a wide-ranging survey of pop, hip-hop, and rock videos. The chapter begins with a discussion of the historical emergence of music videos as a powerful player in international popular culture with the appearance of MTV, before moving into an analysis of the earliest music videos to feature martial arts—several of which were, interestingly, parodic, comic, novelty, or eccentric rap songs, performed by white artists. Later texts demonstrate chaotic relationships with and (mis)understandings of Asian countries and cultures. The chapter argues that martial arts themes are particularly significant in progressive rap and hip-hop music videos, while in pop and rock videos martial arts are often treated as comic.

The Meaning of Martial Arts

Having taken the time to identify several discursive regularities and recurring motifs in martial arts imagery, Chapter 6 moves further into ‘delineating a discursive constellation’. This chapter combines a deeper theorization of the discursive entity of martial arts as a floating signifier with a study of martial arts in the British national press and a discussion of the cacophony of images of martial arts in recent media history. In further clarifying the shifting and variable status of martial arts in anglophone contexts, the chapter reflects on its similarities and differences in terms of a consideration of the range of terms used for Chinese martial arts. It argues that all of these reflect different cultural and political interests, and turns to reflect on what it terms the narrative arc of appropriation in martial arts. The chapter closes on a discussion of martial arts and issues in gender and feminism, before returning to the fragmented and fragmentary character of encounters with and representations of martial arts.

Martial Arts into Media Culture

After reflecting on the convulsions and tectonic shifts in attitudes and approaches to interpersonal combat caused by the horrors of the First World War, Chapter 3 explores the movements of ‘Martial Arts into Media Culture’. This chapter covers the emergence of different kinds of comic (from war comics to Marvel) which feature impressive feats of combat, and the early appearance of arts such as judo and karate in various media. It analyses memorable media moments, such as the influential TV series, The Avengers, and the long-running series of adverts for the aftershave ‘Hai Karate’, before opening out into the discursive explosion of martial arts texts in the 1970s.

Inventing Martial Subjects

This chapter examines contemporary academic and popular media conceptualizations of masculinity in relation to ‘hardness’. It stages this through a close reading of a recent documentary called ‘Hard Men’, which focuses on working-class masculinity. It then examines recent claims of connections between MMA practice and fascist ideologies. The chapter ultimately argues that an analysis of the formation or invention of political identities is a crucial task for media, cultural, and martial arts studies—a task that requires attention not just to local, physical, embodied, or ‘concrete’ contexts and practices ‘proper’, but that also involves analyses that take seriously the places and functions of transnational media culture, and the ways that subjects and objects of discourse and of study across all manner of media, medium, and cultural text and context are portrayed.

The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts

Chapter 9 examines ‘The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts’ and explores the status of the imagined binaries that often structure interest in ‘traditional East Asian’ arts, as well as the desire for authenticity and the problematic status of change in traditionalist martial arts. The chapter argues for what it calls the micro-ontological inevitability of change, as a consequence of the inevitability of difference even in repetition (or what Jacques Derrida theorized as reiteration). To provide evidence to support what might otherwise be called an entirely theoretical argument, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the changing form, content, and characteristics of the traditionalist Chinese martial art of taijiquan (tai chi).

Martial Ads

Chapter 8 explores other important fragments of culture—TV adverts. Called ‘martial ads’, it argues that in a comparative analysis of British adverts, a clear distinction can be seen between those that feature Japanese and those that feature Chinese martial arts. Whereas the former are depicted as ‘normal’, the latter often continue to be exoticized. Some adverts also demonstrate cultural confusion or indifference about the specificities of Chinese and Japanese culture and martial arts. However, at the same time, still other adverts combine a nostalgia for 1970s Hong Kong aesthetics in adverts that thoroughly eroticize the Asian male lead—something that film critics have often criticized Hollywood for failing to do. The chapter also examines other adverts in which martial-artsy combat is eroticized, orientalized, and/or depicted as ludicrous.