• DOI:10.1215/10679847-11-1-51
• Corpus ID: 145652404

Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure

@article{Prashad2003BruceLA,
  title={Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure},
  author={Vijay Prashad},
  journal={positions: east asia cultures critique},
  year={2003},
  volume={11},
  pages={51 - 90}
}

• V. Prashad
• Published 4 April 2003
• Art
• positions: east asia cultures critique

Kung fu is back. Jackie Chan enlivens it on the big screen, Sammo Hung on the small. Children abandon soccer practice for their dojos, adults move from Jazzercize to Billy Blanks’s Tae-Bo. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five took their names from the idioms of kung fu movies, while young emcees find philosophical lessons in them (from the Wu Tang Clan to the Jeet Kune Flow of the Arsonists’ Q-Unique). If Bollywood movies and culture provide “kitsch with a niche,” kung fu puts the tang in Wu Tang.1 As the U.S. government conducts its war against the planet mainly on the Asian continent, from the fifth Afghan war to the presence of special forces in the Philippines and in Indonesia, with its threats against the “Axis of Evil” from Asia’s far east (Korea) to its far west (Iraq and Iran), Asian artifacts emerge within U.S. society as the hallmark of the postmodern cool. Kung fu, unlike Bollywood, has a different genealogy. It returns to the mainstream as part of the retro-1970s move among the urban hip. Those