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Fighting Stars
Fighting Stars provides a rich and diverse account of the emergence and legacies of Hong Kong martial arts cinema stars. Tracing the meanings and influence of stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi , and Donnie Yen against the shifting backdrops of the Hong Kong film industry, the contributors to this important volume highlight martial arts stars' cultural reach, both on a local and global scale. Each of the chapters, written by a host of renowned international scholars, focuses on an individual film star, considering issues such as martial arts practices and philosophies, gender and age, national identities and conflicts, cinematic genres and aesthetic choices in order to understand their local and transnational cultural influence.
A Companion to the Action Film
An authoritative guide to the action-packed film genre With 24 incisive, cutting-edge contributions from esteemed scholars and critics, A Companion to the Action Filmprovides an authoritative and in-depth guide to this internationally popular and wide-ranging genre. As the first major anthology on the action film in more than a decade, the volume offers insights into the genre’s historical development, explores its production techniques and visual poetics, and provides reflections on the numerous social, cultural, and political issues it has and continues to embody. A Companion to the Action Film offers original research and critical analysis that examines the iconic characteristics of the...
Deconstructing Martial Arts
What is the essence of martial arts? What is their place in or relationship with culture and society? Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies.
Legacies of the Drunken Master
In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Legacies of the Drunken Master—the first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy—interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body. It draws on an interdisciplinary engagem...
Postcolonial Governmentalities
This edited volume asks how governmentality and postcolonial approaches can be brought together to help us better understand specific sites and practices of contemporary postcolonial governance. The framework/approach was inspired by the recent use of governmentality approaches that emphasize how governance functions not solely through states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the conduct of individuals and institutions through both freedom and constraint. A postcolonial approach to governance exposes the role of postcolonial sites and practices in shaping governance and the inequalities embedded within it, insofar as standards of conduct determine which subjects are privil...
The Invention of Martial Arts
"The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call 'martial arts' and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV and other media. It argues that 'martial arts' exploded into popular consciousness entirely thanks to the work of media. Of course, the book does not deny the existence of real, material histories and non-media dimensions in martial arts practices. But it thoroughly recasts the status of such histories, combining recent myth-busting findings in historical martial arts research with important insights into the discontinuous character of history, the widespread 'invention of tradition', the orientalism and imagined geogra...
Everyday Representations of War in Late Modernity
This book analyses photographic and cinematographic representations of war and its memorialisation rituals in the period of late modernity from the perspectives of cultural sociology, philosophy, art theory and film studies. It reveals how the experience of war trauma takes root in everydayness and shows how artists try to question the ‘normality’ of the everyday, to actualise the memory of war trauma, to rethink the contrasting experiences of the time of war and everydayness, and to oppose the imposed historical narratives. The new representations are analysed by developing theories of war as a ‘magic spectacle’, also by using such concepts as spectres, triumph and trauma, collective social catastrophes, forensic architecture and others.
The Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas
The violence of combat sports left a mark on how fans and communities remembered athletes. As individual endeavors, combat sports have often produced more detailed, emotionally poignant, and deeply personal stories of triumph than those associated with team sports. Commemorative statues to combat athletes are therefore unique as historical markers and sites of memory. These statues tell remarkable stories of the athletes themselves, but also the people and communities that planned and built them, the cities and towns that memorialized them, the fans who followed them, and the evolution of memory and place in the decades that followed their inauguration. Edited by C. Nathan Hatton and David M. K. Sheinin, The Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars from across North America to interrogate the intimate and layered meanings attached to these monuments to the lives and legacies of combat athletes.
Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China
How do contemporary Chinese audiences access art cinema? What are the alternative channels for the distribution and exhibition of art cinema in China? How is Chinese art cinema changing with the booming of internet media and commodity culture in the 21st century? To answer these questions, Xiang Fan explores the dynamic networks of art cinema in China in the 21st century, highlighting the cultural practices of intermediaries such as independent programmers, internet critics, and fan translators. Offering insights gleaned from original ethnographic research, Fan reveals how these intermediary practitioners think about cinema, negotiate judgement and appreciation, construct a discourse of valu...
The Cinema of Stephen Chow
An in-depth exploration of the stardom and authorship of Stephen Chow Sing-chi, one of Hong Kong cinema's most enduringly popular stars and among its most commercially successful directors. In the West, Stephen Chow is renowned as the ground-breaking director and star of global blockbusters such as Kung Fu Hustle (2004) and Shaolin Soccer (2001). Among Hong Kong audiences, Chow is celebrated as the leading purveyor of local comedy, popularising the so-called mo-lei-tau (“gibberish”) brand of Cantonese vernacular humour, and cultivating a style of madcap comedy that often masks a trenchant social commentary. This volume approaches Chow from a diverse range of critical perspectives. Each of the essays, written by a host of renowned international scholars, offers compelling new interpretations of familiar hits such as From Beijing with Love (1994) and Journey to the West (2013). The detailed case studies of seminal local and global movies provide overdue critical attention to Chow's filmmaking, highlighting the aesthetic power, economic significance, and cultural impact of his films in both domestic and global markets.
