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The Invention of Martial Arts
The Invention
of Martial Arts
Popular Culture between Asia and America
Paul Bowman
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bowman, Paul, 1971–author.
Title: The invention of martial arts /popular culture between Asia and America /
Paul Bowman.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020016651 (print) | LCCN 2020016652 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197540336 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197540343 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780197540367 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Martial arts—Anthropological aspects. |
Martial arts—History.
Classification: LCC GV1101 .B68 2021 (print) | LCC GV1101 (ebook) |
DDC 796.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016651
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. Conceptual Foundations—The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular

Culture between Asia and America 12
2. Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts: From Beginning at

the Origin to the Origin of the Beginning 32
3. Martial Arts into Media Culture 57
4. Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing: Inventing Popular Martial

Arts Aesthetics 77
5. From Linear History to Discursive Constellation 99
6. The Meaning of Martial Arts 129
7. I Want My TKD: Martial Arts in Music Videos 145
8. Martial Ads 177
9. The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts 193
10. Inventing Martial Subjects: Toxic Masculinity, MMA,

and Media Representation 214
Conclusion: After the Invention 240
References 245
Index 259
Acknowledgements
The idea behind this book occurred to me in 2013, and I have been working to-
wards realizing it ever since. However, other things needed to be in place first.
This took the form of my 2015 monograph, Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting
Disciplinary Boundaries, the establishment of The Martial Arts Studies
Research Network, with its annual conferences, and the creation of the aca-
demic journal, Martial Arts Studies.
This project really began to find its feet in late 2016, when I secured a re-
search assistant to help me uncover and analyse stories about martial arts
in the British press. From that point onwards, over a period of three years,
three different research assistants (funded by Cardiff University’s CUROP
Programme) assisted me invaluably with different aspects of the project. In
2017, Paul Hilleard worked with me to research British newspaper stories on
martial arts and martial artists; in 2018, Jia Kuek helped me to research the
British martial arts cultural industry; and in 2019, Kirsten Mackay helped me
to carry out broad-based research across a wide range of media, including
film and television archives. At the very end of the project, my most eagle-
eyed PhD student, Evelina Kazakevičiūté, compiled the index. I thank all of
these excellent students for their contributions, and the School of Journalism,
Media and Culture at Cardiff University, for its consistent support.
I first presented the outline argument and preliminary findings at re-
search seminars in Cardiff University during 2017–2018; one in the School
of Journalism, Media and Culture, in December 2017, and another in
the Critical and Cultural Theory Seminar Series in the School of English,
Communication and Philosophy, in March 2018. I also gave seminars on the
research to the Cardiff hub of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network at
that time. Colleagues, including George Jennings, Terry Morrell, and Qays
Stetkevych, provided invaluable feedback.
The first full draft of the manuscript was written between 2018 and 2019,
while I was a beneficiary of Cardiff University’s Distinguished Research Leave
Fellowship Scheme. During this time, I was also invited to present drafts of
the arguments and research findings in the research seminars of the Institut
de la Communication et des Médias, Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, in October
2018, at the kind invitation of Professor Éric Maigret; and in the Department
of Media, Culture and Heritage at Newcastle University, at the kind invitation
viii Acknowledgements
of Dr Darren Kelsey. The work presented on these occasions went on to ma-

ture into the cores of Chapters 1, 2, and 3.
Critical ethnomusicologist Colin P. McGuire gave invaluable feedback
on an early draft of Chapter 4, ‘Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing: Inventing
Popular Martial Arts Aesthetics’. Further valuable input was given by Kyle
Barrowman, Spencer Bennington, Daniel Jaquet, Benjamin N. Judkins, Glen
Mimura, and other colleagues, when I presented its argument at a research
seminar on 22 May 2019 at the University of California Irvine, at the kind in-
vitation of Professors Glen Mimura and James Steintrager. I also presented the
core argument and research findings of Chapter 5, ‘From Linear History to
Discursive Constellation’, at the fifth annual Martial Arts Studies Conference,
held at Chapman University, Orange, California, on 23 May 2019. For hosting
this important conference and offering me such a valuable opportunity to pre-
sent to an audience of respected peers, I thank Professor Andrea Molle of the
School of Political Science at Chapman University.
Research for Chapters 6, 7, and 8 took place in 2018, and I was able to pre-
sent aspects of it, organized around my analysis of the eroticized violence of
certain adverts, at the conference, ‘The Pleasures of Violence’, held at Oxford
Brookes University, on 7–8 March 2019. For this opportunity, I thank the or-
ganizer, Dr Lindsay Steenberg.
Chapter 9, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts’, emerged in re-
sponse to three different calls: first, from Dr Xiujie Ma from the College
of Chinese Wushu, Shanghai University of Sport, who spent twelve months
under my supervision as a visiting researcher in Cardiff between 2018 and
2019, and who constantly urged me to write articles for a Chinese audience.
An initial, shorter version of the core argument of this chapter was written
for him, to be translated for publication in China. At the same time, David
Lewin and Karsten Kenklies invited me to write on the theme of ‘East Asian
Pedagogies: Education as Transformation across Cultures and Borders’. The
chapter I wrote for their forthcoming collection also fed strongly into this
chapter. Similarly, at that time, a short entry I wrote for a companion to
sport in Asia for Zhuxiang Lu and Fan Hong also fed into the work on this
chapter.
Finally, Chapter 10, ‘Inventing Martial Subjects: Toxic Masculinity,
MMA, and Media Representation’, was written in response to an invitation
from Professor Kay Schiller to contribute to the workshop ‘Masculinities
and Martial Sports: East, West and Global South’, hosted in the Institute of
Advanced Study at the University of Durham, 6–7 December 2018. I thank
Professor Schiller for this opportunity. Key evidence that underpins the basis
of this chapter’s argument about the media invention of mixed martial arts
Acknowledgements ix
(MMA) was provided by my former Ph.D. student, Dr Kyle Barrowman.

I thank Kyle for generously sharing with me his encyclopaedic knowledge
of MMA and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history. The paper he
gave at the 2020 Martial Arts Studies Conference, ‘Inventing MMA: On the
Political and Cultural Formation of a Concept’, has enormously enriched my
own arguments in this chapter.
During 2019, the manuscript for this book received no less than six helpful
peer reviews: four anonymous reviews were undertaken by Oxford University
Press, and two within the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff
University. I thank the Oxford University Press reviewers—and Norm Hirschy
for supporting this project—as well as my two highly esteemed colleagues,
Professor Simon Cottle and Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. All reviewers
provided helpful feedback, criticism, and suggestions for improvement. Only
one of the anonymous reviewers was overly critical of my approach and my
argument (proposing that my argument was ‘obvious’ and that my writing was
too dense).
I thank this most critical reviewer in particular, for giving me a clear sense
of the ways in which—and the reasons why—this book could be misunder-
stood and misread. In response to that review, I redoubled my efforts to make
the language as accessible as possible while yet still able to express the sub-
tlety and complexity of my argument about the historical emergence—or,
as I prefer, the invention—of martial arts in international media and cul-
ture. Needless to say, all mistakes are entirely my own responsibility. I cor-
dially invite scholars to work with, work over, develop, dispute, reconfigure,
and enrich the historical, conceptual, and analytical work I have begun in the
following pages.
As ever, I thank my wife, Alice, for her patience in the face of my obsessions.
Over time, I have actually come to appreciate the value of a strict ‘no talking
about martial arts’ rule that she has long tried to impose. This rule aims to
protect not only those around me, but also to protect me from myself. Alice
has always enriched me and broadened my horizons, and without her (and
her strict ‘do not talk about fight club’ rules), I could well have become a ‘one
dimensional man’.
Finally, a word about the cover image. The artist, Jon Daniel, always had an
interest in the significance of non-white action heroes for black and ethnic
minority children and teens around the world, but especially in the over-
whelmingly white context of Great Britain. Jon’s world-famous collection of
black popular cultural memorabilia from the 1960s and ’70s, and his series of
light-hearted yet serious works, ‘Afro Supa Heroes’, illustrate this passion, and
its significance.
x Acknowledgements
When I met Jon, we would always discuss these matters, and we hatched
plans to work together in different ways. I began work on a project to produce
a series of short documentary films about the status of martial arts in British
culture and society. We planned one episode that would feature Jon and other
important thinkers and cultural figures in a film that would be entitled ‘Black,
British, and Bruce Lee’. To me, this was to be the backbone of the project, and
would be the flagship film of the series.
But Jon was taken from us, far too early, in 2017. We never had a chance to
work together, and I found that I could not return to that particular project in
any way, shape, or form without him. But his artwork, and his important col-
lections live on.
When working with me to create a cover image for this particular book,
my colleague, Dr Sara Sylvester, helped me realize that an ideal image for
the cover of this book already existed, in the form of Jon’s artwork, titled
‘Williams’. In the influential 1973 classic, Enter the Dragon, Williams is a sup-
porting character to the dazzling Bruce Lee. But he speaks volumes about the
international and multi-ethnic appeal of East Asian martial arts in the early
1970s. Indeed, as a figure, Williams is both secondary and yet strangely cen-
tral. As such, ‘Williams’ amounts to an ideal image for the cover of this pre-
sent study. I sincerely thank his widow, Jane, for her kind permission to reuse
this striking image on the cover of the book. I dedicate it to the memory of
Jon Daniel. Whatever else happens with the book in the future, one thing
is certain. Thanks to Jon’s artwork, I certainly need not worry about how it
looks: in the words of Williams in Enter the Dragon, it will always be ‘too busy
looking good’.
The Invention of Martial Arts
Introduction
What Kind of Book Is This and Who Is It For?
This book is based on research into and arguments about a hitherto neglected
relationship between martial arts, media, and popular culture. It seeks to con-
tribute specifically to media and cultural studies and to the emergent aca-
demic field of martial arts studies. Martial arts studies is an interdisciplinary
research area that analyses myriad aspects of martial arts, including prac-
tices, histories, traditions, institutions, and textual representations (Bowman
2014a; 2015; Bowman and Judkins 2015). The book is primarily concerned
with media representations of martial arts—particularly with the kinds and
contexts of representation that have so far been neglected by scholars. For in-
stance, much has been written about martial arts in media such as mainstream
film, but considerably less has been written about martial arts in such equally
popular and prevalent forms as pop songs, music videos, children’s television
and advertisements. These often ignored yet important realms of media cul-
ture take up much of the focus of the book. My claim is that no matter how
trivial such representations may appear, they are significant and possibly con-
sequential in different ways and thus deserve serious attention for a range of
reasons.
The field of martial arts studies uses forms of analysis derived and devel-
oped from many academic fields, and involves diverse theories, methodolo-
gies, and analytical techniques. This is necessary not only because martial
arts studies is an emergent and ‘pre-paradigmatic’ area that is in a sense ‘still
finding its feet’ (Nicholls 2010; Bowman 2015) but also because martial arts
must be approached as complex practices that exist within the realms of media
representation, cultural discourse, art, social institutions, law, commerce, ed-
ucation, and even government policy as much as they exist within specific
human minds and bodies, clubs, schools, associations, and lineage traditions
(Kennedy 2010; Trausch 2018b). Martial arts are heterogeneous, diverse, mul-
tiple, and scattered. They appear in bits and pieces, in proxies, in connota-
tions, associations, condensations, metaphors and metonymies, in different
forms, all over media, culture, and society.
The Invention of Martial Arts. Paul Bowman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197540336.001.0001.
2 Introduction
This book explores issues drawn from media texts available in the British
context and explores them in terms of questions and concerns derived from
debates in media and cultural studies, ethnicity and gender studies, martial
arts studies, ideology studies, postcolonial studies, and popular culture. In
doing so, it incorporates different theories, arguments, and conceptualizations
of cultural and social practices, and indeed of culture and society themselves.
Some of these may be unfamiliar to non-academic readers or those working
in areas of academia that do not incorporate cultural theory. However, when
introducing and using theoretical terms, concepts, and arguments, the text
has been made as clear as possible, with explanations of what specific tech-
nical terms mean, and setting out the most relevant points and contours of the
theory or argument in question.
Why Theory?
At first glance, martial arts may seem simple. However, any discussion of
them will involve an implicit or explicit theory about them. Indeed, theory
is unavoidable in any discussion of culture or society, or any of their features.
We can see this in the fact that there are always disputes about what culture
and society themselves ‘are’, and hence what the things within them are—
what they mean, and what they do. In both academic and wider public dis-
course, all of this is a matter of dispute. There are many different theories and
arguments about what things are and do. Different features and phenomena
‘within’ culture or society can be explained in more than one way, or taken as
evidence for very different things. For instance, martial arts practices, when
evaluated in terms of one theory, might be read as expressing some funda-
mental facet of human nature. In terms of another theory, they might be read
as media-fuelled escapism (Brown 1997). They may be read as individualistic
practices or, conversely, as deeply communal (Partikova 2019); some may re-
gard them as standardizing, or forms of consumerism, while others may see
them as stimulating uniqueness and creativity (O’Shea 2018a). Some perspec-
tives can frame martial arts as practices that normalize identities and behav-
iours (García 2018), while others can perceive ways that martial arts enable
multiple kinds of gender, class, ethnic, and other kinds of identity invention,
transgression, transformation, and diversification (Brown 1997; Maor 2019);
and much more besides.
In this work, I use different theories in much the same way that scien-
tists might use different lenses on a microscope, or different scanning de-
vices, to establish more about the properties of entities and organisms, from
Introduction 3
micro-organisms on a slide to symptoms within an entire (social) body. Put

differently, just as different kinds of medical scans can draw different dimen-
sions of the human organism into visibility, thereby enabling clinicians to see
different things, so different cultural theories provide different ways of looking
and different ways of seeing to the cultural analyst (Berger 1972; White 1997;
Bowman 2007a; Nicholls 2010).
In the study of culture, different theories offer variations and varieties of
perspective. Looking at things from the perspective of one paradigm or orien-
tation, followed by another, and then another is stimulating and illuminating
in many ways. The shifts in perspective caused by this can produce more well-
rounded or enriched understandings of phenomena, and can also instil a pru-
dent awareness of the limits of our own understanding (De Man 1983; 1986).
However, by the same token, such shifts can also produce contradictory, con-
flicting, incompatible pictures of ‘the same thing’.
Some may regard this situation as potentially paralysing. However, it is ac-
tually enabling in many ways. For, both of these consequences of theory (a
diversity of interpretations and their potential incompatibility) can enable
a more ethical and responsible way of relating to knowledge: we are forced
to acknowledge that we only know things in certain ways, ways that are en-
abled by limited and demarcated viewpoints (Derrida 1992). Consequently,
we must remain aware that there is always likely to be more that we are not
yet aware of, and that the incompleteness of our knowledge should be borne
in mind. Certainly, no single theoretical paradigm or perspective is complete.
Applying the framework or analysis provided in one paradigm can produce
insightful results about certain aspects or dimensions of martial arts, culture,
or society; while, at the same time, that same paradigm will remain unable to
‘see’, ‘deal with’, or ‘say’ anything about other aspects, realms, or registers of
that same thing.
In one regard, theory is highly enabling and productive. But, in another, it is
as much a source of problems as of solutions, especially in social and cultural
studies. Nonetheless, the point to be emphasized is that while some regard
theory as an unnecessary ‘digression’, it is more accurately to be understood
as a necessary evil (Bowman 2007a). We can never really be free from theory
when discussing the human social and cultural world. This is because there
is no consensus on how this or these realms ‘work’. The questions, ‘What is
culture?’ or ‘What is society?’ and ‘How do or does it or they work?’ have not
been answered univocally or in any decisive or satisfactory way (Bowman
2012). There are many competing theories and arguments. Different academic
theories—just like different opinions in everyday life—are either based on, re-
flect, or even actively produce different conceptualizations of culture, society,
4 Introduction
and ‘the way the human world works’. So, we can never be free from theory.
This means that the meanings and consequences of social and cultural phe-
nomena and facts—such as martial arts—are always open to interpretation.
Consequently, rather than trying to reject theory, this work embraces it.
Different theories, arguments, and approaches ask us to think about things in
different ways, to identify different kinds of details and take them seriously,
as possible sources of evidence for interpretations, and to evaluate different
kinds of evidence in different ways. In this regard, different theories and styles
of approach can be rewarding. But the language of theory can also be off-
putting to some readers. When faced with cultural theory, for instance, those
who have not been academically trained to relatively high levels may feel that
they are entering into a world of ‘jargon’.
Jargon versus Technical Language
‘Jargon’ is a pejorative term, and one that is often incorrectly applied. To take
any communication to a higher level, as fast as possible, all practices need
technical languages. If I were in urgent need of medical treatment, I would
not complain if those who were treating me used technical shorthand, ab-
breviations, and professionally agreed terms. To use an analogy that will
bring this back to martial arts: if I go to a new gym or martial arts class, it
may take some time to be taught and to master any technique, from a jab to a
thruster to an arm-bar, or indeed any exercise or technique. But once I have
absorbed something of what goes into the movement or technique, I can
happily use the technical term (whether the name of the technique or of the
mode of its deployment) to discuss it and take my understanding or my per-
formance forward. A boxing coach does not start every session with a slow
run through of how to stand, where to position the hands and how to move
in order to throw a jab. It does not take very long at all before a coach can
simply say ‘Jab!’ or ‘Arm-bar!’, or indeed ‘Thrusters!’—you name it—and the
people they are addressing will understand. The names are technical terms
that have a world of technical knowledge condensed into them. Being able
to use the name for the thing saves time and enables the forward movement
of a discourse.
Academic languages are technical in exactly this sense. This is not to say
they cannot be misused or abused, nor be off-putting or inappropriate in
certain contexts. Terms that feature in this work, such as text, discourse, he-
gemony, ideology, identification, semiotics, deconstruction, poststructuralism,
among others, have a huge amount of content condensed into them—in much
Introduction 5
the same way that jabs, arm-bars, and thrusters have huge amounts contained
within them. You can get the gist of the jab in one lesson; you may work on
perfecting it for years. In discussing it with others, you may find that there is
ever more to say about it. So, in one sense it is simple; in another, it is infinitely
and infinitesimally ever-unfolding (Knorr-Cetina 1981; 2003; Spatz 2015). The
same is true of academic terms and concepts. You can get the gist very quickly,
but it takes work to begin to plumb their depths.
This is the relationship to and use of theory that you will encounter within
this book. It uses the language of the field of media, cultural, and martial arts
studies; it is in dialogue with these fields and seeks to contribute to them. At
the same time, it tries to be as accessible as possible for newer readers, many
of whom will find the treatment of martial arts in this way to be unusual.
Indeed, some have even found this treatment to be offensive (see Bowman
2016a). However, it is important to point out that, contrary to the alarmed
responses of certain critics (especially during the time that academic mar-
tial arts studies first started to gain prominence, around 2015), one thing that
martial arts studies does not do is ‘separate’ or ‘abstract’ martial arts from ‘re-
ality’, or from their ‘truth’, from ‘real values’, actual ‘practice’, or anything of the
sort (Bowman 2016a, 919; 2017a, 61). In fact, if anything, martial arts studies
seeks to do the very opposite: by paying serious and detailed attention to so-
cial and cultural contexts, histories, relations and forces, representations, po-
litical ideologies, economic dimensions, the details of practice, and the many
other factors that have a bearing on producing, controlling, or transforming
martial arts, from the minutiae of specific practices to the (very) social mean-
ings carried by the term ‘martial arts’ in different contexts; not to mention re-
fining our understanding of why certain martial arts are practiced, with what
effects, and so on.
Coverage
This book is the end result of two sustained strands of research and analysis
carried out between 2016 and 2019. The bulk of the primary research car-
ried out was on martial arts as they appear and function in mainstream media
and popular culture. It is from this wide-ranging research that the case studies
discussed in the following pages were selected. During 2017 and 2018 my re-
search was augmented by the invaluable assistance of two research assistants
(Paul Hilleard and Jia Kuek), each exploring distinct fields. This was followed
up by a period of research leave between 2018 and 2019, during which time
I synthesized the research and wrote up this analysis of the findings. The work
6 Introduction
of a third research assistant at this time (Kirsten Mackay) helped to enrich and
refine its historical and cross-media sweep.
Overall, the book is based on new research into the history and develop-
ment of representations and treatments of martial arts as they feature within
key, but often overlooked, realms of popular culture, with a specific focus on
texts as they have circulated within British popular culture. All of this was
singled out for research because it has hitherto been significantly under-
researched. By comparison with research into martial arts in Asia or America,
or the filmic and popular cultural traffic between these geographical and
cultural regions, Britain appears as a backwater. Yet, Britain has not only re-
ceived and consumed Asian and American popular cultural texts about and
approaches to martial arts for decades; it has also produced its own martial
arts cultural texts. My aim in this research was to uncover and analyse this
semiotic environment and discursive context, in order to understand more
about the appearance, development, and circulation of ideas about and im-
ages of martial arts in media culture.
British popular culture and society has never existed in isolation from the trade
route that I am here characterizing as spanning ‘between’ Asia and America;
nor can it be divorced from it. The traffic between these two major sources and
destinations has had myriad effects on British popular culture. My interest,
throughout the research projects underpinning this work, was in exploring what
‘went into’ the production of texts and practices in the British context and ex-
ploring the characteristics of British productions, but always within the context
of this complex, international textual traffic system. In singling out ‘Asia’ and
‘America’ as key driving forces of martial arts in popular culture, the complex sit-
uation of non-Asian and non-American popular cultures is formulated through
the at-once clarifying and simplifying image of being ‘between’.
There are problems with this characterization, but there is also ample justi-
fication for it. For, when it comes to the production and circulation of martial
arts texts, discourses and practices, it is undoubtedly the case that, increas-
ingly throughout the twentieth century, Asia and America have been the
two main regional powerhouses of both popular cultural ideas and the most
widely known practices of martial arts. This is exemplified both in terms of
the growth and spread of martial arts practices in these and other societies
and in terms of the scale and impact of the films produced in the film in-
dustries of Hong Kong, Japan, and Hollywood—products that constructed,
disseminated, fuelled, and fanned the flames of international martial arts
booms, crazes, and enduring cultural transformations the world over (Lo
2005; Morris, Li, and Chan 2005; Hiramoto 2014; Marchetti and Kam 2007;
Hiramoto 2014; Barrowman 2015).
Introduction 7
A visual metaphor for this situation can be found in a scene in the 1982
Hollywood Cold War film, Firefox. In this film, an American military agent
(Clint Eastwood) steals the Soviet Union’s new super-jet (the eponymous
Firefox)—a jet with amazing qualities, including the ability to remain invis-
ible to radar. As he flies away over a frozen landscape, the pilot inspects the
controls in the cockpit and says to himself, ‘Ah, let’s see what this thing can do.’
He then accelerates to astonishing speeds as he tests the manoeuvrability of
the jet, flying at a very low altitude. After a few seconds, he notices that flying
at such low altitude and at such great speed has caused the jet’s powerful slip-
stream to throw up a long path of vast clouds of snow and debris. Given that
he is attempting to escape Soviet airspace unnoticed and undetected while
they are undoubtedly looking for him very intensely, this is a terrible mis-
take: the snow and debris thrown up like a storm in his slipstream will provide
clear evidence to Soviet radar of exactly where Firefox has been, as well as its
direction and speed.
This visual image captures something of the situation in Britain and other
countries in response to the force of martial arts films, magazines, books,
manuals, fashions, and practices flowing out of Asia and America during the
second half of the twentieth century. Hugely influential powerhouses of films,
television programmes, music videos, magazines, books, fashions, ideas, and
embodied practices have flown at low level and great speed across the world,
whipping up the terrain and exposing innumerable locales to new ideas, im-
ages, ideals, aspirations, fantasies, and lifestyle choices, tearing through and
reconfiguring much of the cultural material that was there before—causing
turbulence, generating new activity, stimulating excitement and interest, and
moving things around significantly (Bowman 2010a). I find this a suggestive
way to visualize the cross-cultural traffic of martial arts texts and practices.
My aim in this research project was to gain a better understanding of the texts
and practices that were produced before, in the tumult caused by, and in the
wake of, the most well-known and influential Asian and American martial
arts texts and practices that tore through the media and cultural landscape.
Simply put, my first questions were: ‘What happened in Britain?’ and ‘What
was seen, done, thought, and made here?’
Media History and Cultural Analysis
That particular historical context has not been researched in this way before.
However, this book is not simply a work of history. There is certainly both
a strong sense of and a respect for chronology and causality within it. But it
8 Introduction
does not solely seek to provide a detailed or exhaustive narrative of events.

Nor does it give a behind-the-scenes study of production contexts. Rather, it
sets out many textual moments and events, zooms in on certain of these, and
explores them in terms of questions of how specific stories, issues, representa-
tions, and constructions have worked to produce or modify the meanings and
values that are given to martial arts in popular culture.
As mentioned, this work is organized by the argument that popular cul-
tural texts, narratives, images, and representations play a crucial, creative role
in the invention of wider cultural understandings of martial arts (Iwamura
2005; Goto-Jones 2014; Trausch 2018a). So, the word ‘invention’ in the title re-
fers more to the invention of ideas about martial arts, ways of thinking about
them, depicting them, valuing them, and so on, than it does to the work of
individuals or groups who have literally invented new martial arts styles or
systems. Certainly, some attention is given to such matters; but the main at-
tention is given to the ways that texts play a large part in the creation, circu-
lation, maintenance, and modification of our understandings and values. To
use an enduringly popular academic term (one that I discussed in terms of
accusations of ‘jargon’, earlier), this work is interested in the creation and de-
velopment of the discourses of, on, and about martial arts in popular media
culture.
In this sense, the work differs both from straightforward historical studies
and from the increasingly popular genre of studies that might be called
‘myth busters’ (Henning 1994; 1995; 1999; Wile 1996; Shahar 2008; Lorge
2012; Judkins and Nielson 2015; Moenig 2015). This is not to disparage myth
busting. One of the first tasks of the emergent field of martial arts studies in-
volved combining solid historical research (into the origin and development
of martial arts) with close attention to the ways that interested parties within
and around martial arts have often worked, consciously or unconsciously,
to sell images, ideas, and stories about martial arts that are very far from the
truth of actual historical reality (Chan 2000). Martial arts stylists tell amazing
stories about their art’s historical lineage and the adventures of its founders
and central figures. Clubs, associations and entrepreneurs of all kinds capi-
talize on these myths and legends (Miracle 2015). Regions, cultures, and even
nation-states can also ‘cash in’. In fact, there are any number of reasons why
all kinds of people can come to believe in and perpetuate mythological fan-
tasies about martial arts—as being ancient, timeless, born on a misty moun-
taintop, invented by a demigod, unchanging, superlative, philosophical, and
so on (Bowman 2017a). Consequently, therefore, there are an equal number
of good reasons why scholars might want to engage in myth busting, in order
to replace baseless legends with historical facts.
Introduction 9
Some really important studies have emerged in recent years that do valu-
able myth-busting work in all kinds of national, cultural, and ideological con-
texts (Henning 1994; 1995; 1999; Wile 1996; Shahar 2008; Lorge 2012; Judkins
and Nielson 2015; Moenig 2015). Some of the scholars who are engaged in
myth busting are effectively at war with myth-promoting powers. Needless
to say, I entirely support myth-busting projects. However, this work is not ex-
actly that kind of text. It does something different. As valid and valuable as
the orientation is, myth busting is neither the sole nor the ultimate orienta-
tion that martial arts studies can or should seek to have. Challenging myths
and replacing them with historical facts may answer a need, redress a balance,
correct the record, take down some charlatans, and give practitioners a truer
sense of their place in larger historical, cultural, political, and ideological pro-
cesses. But an exclusive focus on myth busting will soon come to be limiting.
This is not to say that it is not important to put the word out there that some
of the most well-known ‘ancient’ martial arts emerged in their present forms
during the twentieth century. It is valuable to be aware that all styles of karate,
aikido, taekwondo, and Brazilian jiujitsu, for instance, are twentieth-century
inventions (Funakoshi 1975; Chan 2000; Moenig 2015). Even the avowedly
‘modern’ (late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century) martial art of judo is
actually older than many supposedly ancient martial arts. Similarly, what is
now known as either kung fu or wushu should properly be understood as a
modern construction (Kennedy 2010; Judkins 2014). Perhaps most surpris-
ingly, the ‘ancient’ art of taiji (AKA tai chi, taijiquan, or t’ai chi ch’üan) can
actually be understood as a nineteenth-century cultural and ideological re-
sponse to modernity (Wile 1996). This short list names merely some of the
most well-known martial arts.
Throughout this present work, I rely on many valuable studies that have
unearthed and examined the historical emergence, technical development,
and complex social and cultural situations of different martial arts. However,
I also seek to redress another balance and to show the importance and value
of other possible focuses, perspectives, and orientations within martial arts
studies and media studies. For, overwhelmingly, martial arts studies have
tended to focus on the specific practices, histories, and institutions of martial
arts themselves. This is hardly surprising. But I have always been suspicious of
the tacit assumption that wider cultural understandings of martial arts prac-
tices and cultures derive directly or solely from actual practices themselves.
Representations of those practices—and, before that, older ideas and fanta-
sies about exotic foreign cultures of origin—have circulated in different media
(from literature to journalism to film) and permeated or ‘pre-constituted’
the ways they are most likely to be understood (Krug 2001). So, my question
10 Introduction
has been: where do our ideas of martial arts actually come from? There are
many issues and factors to consider here, but the answer I put forward in this
work is as unequivocal as it is potentially controversial: they come from media
representations. It is for this reason that my contention has always been that
one of the primary fields of concern in any cultural, social, historical, eco-
nomic, philosophical, or even psychological study of martial arts should be all
manner of media.
Representing Martial Arts in the Media
Those who have read any of my works on martial arts may recall that I have
proposed such arguments before (Bowman 2014a; 2014b; 2015). I have made
them in my studies of cultural texts that I believed at the time of writing to
have been enormously culturally significant and consequential (Bowman
2010a; 2013a; 2017a). Of course, I am certainly not the only person to regard
the media representation of martial arts as primary and constitutive of our
sense of what specific martial arts ‘are’. But I have in the past received criticism
for my attention to mainstream media icons such as Bruce Lee (rather than
other, less mainstream figures) and also for my rarely modified operating as-
sumption that the term ‘martial arts’ principally connotes Asian martial arts
(Wetzler 2017). Furthermore, there remain significant numbers of scholars
who do not respect the status, work, role, and importance of media represen-
tations in the constitution, construction, or invention of martial arts. In one
respect, this present work seeks to justify, underpin, clarify, and develop all of
this more fully.
To be clear, the fundamental argument in play here is based in a rigorously
theorized understanding of the notion of representation, as has been carried
out in the fields of poststructuralism, critical theory, and cultural studies
for well over half a century. The short version of this perspective runs as fol-
lows: although we tend to think of representations either as reflecting reality,
or as being correct or incorrect, in actual fact, representations construct our
sense and understanding of reality (Hall et al 1997). So, although we tend to
think of representations as secondary and derivative, hence less important
than reality, they are in many respects and contexts our principal access to
‘reality’ (Silverman 1983). In other words, rather than the situation being one
of ‘reality versus representation’, it is rather the case that reality is a complex
construct made up principally of representations. Moreover, often these repre-
sentations are rarely of anything more or less real than other representations,
in a sea of representations.
Introduction 11
This line of thinking has fuelled numerous intellectual traditions, from

scepticism to postmodernism. And sometimes it has manifested in people
claiming to think either that it is impossible to know or prove anything about
reality (or to doubt whether reality exists), or to propose that any reality there
ever was has been lost and replaced by a world of unreal representations and
simulations. Of course, many of these supposed positions are actually cari-
catural representations of more subtle and complex arguments. And, when
faced with arguments about the primacy of representations, or the ‘loss of the
real’, martial artists are ideally placed to argue the contrary and to point out the
compelling evidence that there definitely seems to be a reality outside of the
world of representation: being kicked and punched, attacked with weapons,
twisted, locked, thrown, or choked out, all exist very much for practitioners
in the embodied realm of the senses, rather than the realm of ideas, arguments,
and signs (Spencer 2011; Downey 2014; Bowman 2018).
But this is not quite the point. In terms of martial arts and the question of
the place, role, significance, and effects of representation, the question is not,
‘Do they really exist?’ It is rather, ‘How are martial arts represented?’—what
are they depicted and understood as, what codes, conventions, and clichés
congregate around them; what common themes recur; who do we see doing
martial arts and why; which kinds of martial arts, which styles, and with what
wider ideas and values are they associated? To begin to plumb these depths,
this work focuses on images of martial arts that circulate in some at once pop-
ular and yet critically overlooked media texts. In doing so, it takes a principled
stand back from studying martial arts ‘proper’, from looking ‘directly’ at prac-
tices, institutions, or their histories. It does so not to deny or hide from the
reality of practices, but rather to extend the purview of martial arts studies.
Put differently: while more studies of martial arts are being animated and or-
ganized by the important insight that martial arts are ‘invented traditions’
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), this work seeks to examine the ways that these
invented traditions are also invented (in) traditions of media representation.
1
Conceptual Foundations
The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture
between Asia and America
Introduction: ‘Mainly of East Asian Origin’
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has an entry for the noun ‘martial art’.
It reads:
Chiefly in plural. Any of various disciplines or sports, mainly of East Asian origin,
which arose as forms of self-defence or attack, such as judo, karate, kendo, kung fu,
and tae kwon do. [ . . . ] more generally: the fighting arts of the warrior. Frequently
attributive. Martial arts encompass both armed and unarmed forms of combat, as
well as non-combative styles. Though frequently practised for sport or exercise,
martial arts traditionally emphasize spiritual training and the unity of body and
mind. In the Japanese tradition, the seven martial arts are fencing, spearmanship,
archery, horse riding, ju-jitsu, the use of firearms, and military strategy; karate is
not considered one of the martial arts.
(Oxford English Dictionary n.d.)
The OED may well be, as it claims, ‘the definitive record of the English lan-
guage’, but sometimes what it includes—and what it omits—can be regarded
as problematic (Williams 1976). Because of this, scholars have sometimes cri-
tiqued the OED’s methods, orientations, selections, and approaches. In the
case of this definition of ‘martial art[s]‌’, many martial arts studies researchers
could certainly find grounds to contest the key claims that it makes, both in
terms of what is included in it and what is excluded from it (Lorge 2012, 9;
Judkins 2014, 5). However, my aim here is neither to rely on the OED, nor to
critique it. Rather, it is to draw attention to the significance both of something
that it includes and something that it omits.
We have already seen what it includes in the definition given above: ‘Any
of various disciplines or sports, mainly of East Asian origin, which arose as
forms of self-defence or attack, such as judo, karate, kendo, kung fu, and tae
kwon do.’ However, it notes that in the formal Japanese tradition, a modern
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197540336.001.0001.
Conceptual Foundations 13
practice like karate is ‘not considered one of the martial arts’. In this, the OED
tells us that whereas karate would remain excluded from the category ‘mar-
tial art’ in the strict terms of the formal tradition of the literal translation of
the Japanese ‘bugei’, it is nonetheless the case that karate is included in the
category ‘martial art’ in current English language usage. This is because in
English the term ‘martial art’ is a far looser, less literal, and more evocative: it
includes sports and self-defence—albeit, ‘mainly’ (the OED asserts) those ‘of
East Asian origin’.
Today, the idea that the term ‘martial arts’ is associated with practices that
are ‘mainly of East Asian origin’ is contentious. This is so, even though for-
mative works in the field of martial arts studies initially tended, more or less
explicitly, to accept the idea that the term ‘martial arts’ in the English language
evoked East Asian practices and traditions (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011).
However, with the development of such fields and practices as Historical
European Martial Arts (HEMA) and the explosion of interest in the indige-
nous martial arts of all manner of countries, cultures, and geographical re-
gions, many would now contest the claim that the term ‘martial arts’ could,
or should, be said to refer to practices that are mainly of East Asian origin
(Wetzler 2017).
It is easy to agree with this claim. However, just as the OED does not seek
to impute fixed transhistorical values to the terms it nonetheless defines—
instead, basing its claims on a sense of their etymological, historical, and cul-
tural development and range of meanings—so it is not my intention to make
a transhistorical or logical argument about ‘martial arts’ really referring to a
far wider range of practices than those that are ‘mainly of East Asian origin’.
Rather, the more important point I want to make is that, despite the poten-
tially transcultural meanings and applicability of the term ‘martial arts’, when
it actually exploded into everyday usage in English, it really did refer to prac-
tices that were held to be mainly of East Asian origin (Bowman 2010a; Farrer
and Whalen-Bridge 2011; Bowman 2013a; 2015; 2017a).
The book you are currently reading details this development. Interestingly,
reading between the lines, this development is registered by the list of usage
examples that the OED gives for the noun ‘martial art’, which is as follows:
1920 Takenobu’s Japanese-Eng. Dict. 119 Bugei, military arts (accomplishments);

feats of arms; martial arts. 1933 Official Guide to Japan (Japanese Govt. Railways)
p. clxxxvi Contests [of kendo] take place nowadays at the annual meetings of the
Butoku-kai, or Association for Preserving the Martial Arts, in Kyōto. 1955 E. J.
Harrison Fighting Spirit Japan (ed. 2) x. 97 Of that branch of Japanese esoterics
which belongs to what may generically be styled bujutsu, literally ‘martial arts,’
14 The Invention of Martial Arts
though the Japanese terminology has a far wider and more comprehensive
scope than its English equivalent, I may justly claim to know something. 1968
Clarendonian 22 270 Chinese Kung-fu is still taught today—but only as a Martial
Art to a very select, carefully chosen few. 1974 Isle of Wight County Press 23 Nov.
31 Mr. Singleton, who holds a Kendo black belt, a brown belt in Karate, and has
just taken up Ju-Jitsu, said he had no intention of ‘cashing in’ on the current mar-
tial arts boom. 1984 W. Boyd Stars & Bars i. iii. 31 There was a large padded mat
area for the martial arts enthusiasts. 1999 Spark (Reading University Students’
Union) 8 Mar. i. 16/1 As it is taught as an effective martial art, and not a sport, the
aim of the jiu jitsuka is not to fight within a set of rules, but to use any technique
necessary.
This list is illuminating in several ways, not least in terms of what is omitted
from it. For, in the first three examples (from 1920, 1933, and 1955), the uses
are taken from strictly Japanese contexts. The term ‘martial art’ is here a literal
translation. However, by the fourth and fifth entries on this list, things have
changed. The 1968 example tells us about kung fu, and that it is only taught
‘as’ a martial art to a ‘select few’. Then, the 1974 entry tells us that a certain Mr
Singleton has ‘no intention of “cashing in” on the current martial arts boom’.
In a tantalizing way, these two entries register and tell us about key changes in
the historical emergence and transformation of the term in English. It moves
out of a specialist niche in 1968 and into the mainstream of popular con-
sciousness by 1974. In this book, I argue that it does so precisely between 1968
and 1974. To use the stark clarity of the terms in the OED list: in 1968 ‘martial
art’ is a lived reality only to a ‘select few’. By 1974, there is a martial arts ‘boom’.
In other words, a very great deal changes in these years.
To be clear from the start: this is not to suggest that there were no martial
arts before the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nor it is to say that martial arts
must necessarily refer to practices that are ‘mainly of East Asian origin’. The ev-
idence of local histories the world over and the conclusions of logical thought
or speculation in its own right should lead us to the conclusion that primitive,
advanced, barbaric, civilized, tribal, military, paramilitary, dynastic, sectarian,
public, private, professional, police, criminal, hobbyist, interpersonal, and so
many other forms of combative practices (whether strictly or only metaphor-
ically ‘martial’) have been around—so to speak—forever (Lorge 2012; Desch-
Obi 2008; Shahar 2008; Wile 1999; T. Brown 1997). But my point is that it is
only with the boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s that martial arts emerged
as what should be termed a discursive entity, or identity in its current sense.
And that ‘sense’ was strongly associated with the idea—if not the reality—of
East Asian origins.
In reality, the origins of the current discursive conjuncture, in which ‘mar-

tial arts’ took on the meanings that the OED more or less correctly identifies,
are considerably more complex than the mere Japanese-to-English transla-
tion of a term, or the movement of embodied practices from their ‘East Asian
origin’ to other countries around the world. The focus of this work is on cer-
tain other origins and other forces of dissemination—origins that often live only
in representations; origins that cross borders, historical epochs, realms, and
registers, via media texts and imaginations more significantly than the contin-
uous histories of embodied practices and traditions.
Of course, the realities of histories and traditions of embodied practices do
exist. This work does not seek to deny that. But it is animated by the need to
examine aspects of martial arts culture that are too easily overlooked or de-
valued as being secondary, derived, attendant, and insignificant—aspects that
nonetheless have long carried out—and continue to carry out—crucial work
in inventing and maintaining the sense of ‘reality’ of martial arts (Trausch
2018a; 2018b; 2019). The privileged realm of these crucial aspects is the world
of media representations. Such representations are the primary focus of
this work.
This focus on media does not deny the long history of the existence of prac-
tices and discourses that we would today call martial arts in countries such
as those of East and West Europe, North and South America, Africa, India,
Australia, and so on (Green and Svinth 2003). But it seeks to put them into
perspective, and to argue that although, for example, HEMA or capoeira (to
gesture to two extremely well-known examples) are certainly not ‘of East
Asian origin’, their current emergence, popularity, and discursive status has to
be understood in relation to a complex transnational (multi)media boom that
took place roughly between the OED’s 1968 and 1974 examples, a boom that
transformed not only the meaning of the term ‘martial art’ on a kind of genetic
level but also catapulted it as what I will term a discursive entity into the main-
stream of international media and popular culture, ineradicably marking and
transforming everything it touched in the process.
Martial Arts as a Discursive Entity
Concisely put, this work examines the ways that ‘martial arts’ has been in-
vented as a discursive entity via popular cultural representations. I use the
singular plural ‘martial arts has’ rather than ‘martial arts have’ because the
proposition here is that even though ‘martial arts’ evokes a plurality, it also
evokes one sort of thing, a culturally recognized field of practices (Lorge 2016,
904). In other words, whilst the world of martial arts practices is multiple,
heterogeneous, and often radically diverse, nonetheless, this plurality has en-
tered discourse as singular entity. The field, discourse, or formation is made up
of many instances, examples, utterances, texts, products, and practices. Each
of these is different, possibly even unique, but in current usage each shares
enough in common with the others to be recognizable as part of that identity.
There may be no universally, necessary, ineluctable, or objective reason why
disparate practices should be grouped together within the category ‘martial
arts’; but simply because currently they are, they can therefore be regarded as
part of this discursive category or identity.
Carrying out stretches before early morning taiji or qigong in the park,
kneeling in seiza in a ‘dojo’ (a dojo that is at other times a community centre,
meeting room, or school gym), jumping rope (or skipping) to build stamina
for sparring, and myriad other practices can all—in the context of today’s lin-
guistic and conceptual usage—be regarded as martial arts activities. They are
neither always nor essentially martial arts activities, but they are sometimes.
Stretching is not always a martial art activity, nor is kneeling, nor is skipping,
nor even is the physical space that may from time to time be called a dojo,
dojang, class, club, or kwoon (Bowman 2019a). A famous Zen koan runs like
this: ‘What happens to my fist when I open my hand?’ We might create our
own koan by posing the question, ‘What happens to my dojo when we go out
and the basketball club comes in?’; ‘What were martial arts before they were
named?’; or ‘What happens to the notion of martial arts we have in our minds
when we open it up to analysis?’
To use the terms of discourse theory, martial arts may well be a floating sig-
nifier, whose meaning is to some extent always in the post and potentially up
for grabs (Laclau 1996). But it is also what Ernesto Laclau (following Jacques
Lacan) called a ‘point de capiton’: a kind of fixed point, one that structures dis-
course (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). It has been created and constructed in dis-
course (like many other terms, such as ‘air quality’, for instance: Barry 2001),
but now that it exists, it gains a weight that actually comes to structure elem-
ents of discourse.
As my use of these terms and arguments suggests, my approach to this
matter owes a debt to discourse theory.1 However, like the discourses that
1 To be specific, originally the theory of Laclau and Mouffe, as seen in their book Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). However, my reading of this was modified by Mowitt’s critique of ‘dis-
course’ in Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Mowitt 1992). I deal at length with my un-
derstanding of ‘discourse’ in my own books, Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (Bowman 2007a) and
Deconstructing Popular Culture (Bowman 2008). All of my writings are infused with this post-structuralist
concept or paradigm.
discourse theory theorizes (and discourses upon), discourse theory itself is a

rather difficult thing to demarcate. It doesn’t have one stable identity or neces-
sitate one essential approach. In fact, there is a lack of unity in both the subject
and the object called ‘discourse’. This is because the word ‘discourse’ is irreduc-
ibly metaphorical,2 and the objects and fields that are discursively constructed
within the discourse of discourse studies (or theorized in discourse theory)
can only ever really be indicated, evoked, conjured up, or argued for, rather
than specified and measured unproblematically. A discourse is not a referent.
It is a construct. The claim that ‘this or that discourse’ exists ‘out there, in the
real world’, is at root, only ever an argument.
As such, the ontological status of discourse theory and of its claims about
discourses in the world is complex and always open to challenge. At root, ‘dis-
courses’ are always open to the accusation that they have been constructed
or invented by the person who may claim merely to have found them. What
this means is that one might make claims about the birth, growth, transfor-
mation, modification, and so on, of a certain discourse—such as martial arts
(in) culture—by such methods as looking at the frequency of the occurrence,
as well as the forms, contents, concerns, valuations, and treatments of martial
arts in different texts, across different media, within a given time period. But,
(i) because there could always be other contexts and other forces at play unbe-
known to the researcher; and (ii) because there will always be other plausible
ways to read the same data and textual evidence; and indeed (iii) because there
could always be other ways to conceptualize the entire cultural, historical,
and social context, it is often effectively impossible to clinch a case decisively
about this or that ‘discourse’—about ‘its’ existence, identity, and parameters,
for whom it exists in this or that way, who or what constructed it, whether it
arose organically from practice, whether motivated parties proposed that it
exists, or whether it is a chimera or mirage of the academic gaze and of aca-
demic language itself. In other words, in discourse studies, the logics of cau-
sality and determination are always to some degree unstable and unclear. It is
never entirely certain whether a thing ‘in’ a given discourse is in fact one thing
(or indeed a thing), or whether any putative or notional ‘discourse’ is in fact
one thing (or indeed a thing). These kinds of formulations are characteristic of
an academic approach known as deconstruction.
In essence, deconstruction is simple. Once a thing is understood to be a
construct, it becomes eminently deconstructable. If it is a construct, then
it is not one thing. It is a construct because it is not one thing. Hence it is
2 Key poststructuralists such as Derrida and Spivak have both discussed the ‘irreducible metaphoricity’
of notions such as ‘structure’ and ‘discourse’. For an accessible discussion, see Hall (1992).
deconstructable. The question remains one of how to ascertain whether this

construct is a construct that exists and operates ‘out there’, in the ‘real world’
(and if so where, driven by what factors, and in the interests of whom), or
whether it is or was entirely constructed ‘in here’, in academic language.
Deconstruction enables us to perceive these ‘undecidables’.3 The chal-
lenge is how to solve or resolve them. This will always boil down to a ques-
tion of argumentation and the provision of evidence to support one’s claims
(Rancière 1992).
On a practical level, the kind of evidence provided by discourse anal-
ysis relates to the proving of its principal proposition: that terms, con-
cepts, values, practices, and so on, are all variable and changeable, that
they have a history, and that the way things are now is neither the way they
have always been, nor the way they will always remain. So, discourse anal-
ysis looks for evidence of the birth, development, movement, change, and
transformation of terms, concepts, values, and practices, and it refers to
these as ‘discourses’. To turn to our own concerns: the very terms that we
use today (‘martial arts,’ ‘martial artists’, and so on) should be understood
to be modern—indeed, recent—constructions (Molasky 2018). A range of
variable, interchangeable, and unstable terms preceded the use of the cur-
rent term ‘martial arts’.
Pre-Histories of Martial Arts
Martial arts historian Joseph Svinth has pointed out the difficulty of finding
reliable search terms when trying to get a sense of the historical develop-
ment and changes in martial arts discourse, in different places. Even if we
are looking only at ‘the British context’, Svinth notes,4 there are actually sev-
eral of these (there is the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland, then pre-
separation, Commonwealth, and so on); and there are different terms and
different uses of related terms in different places, such as Australia, Canada,
and New Zealand. Svinth himself has widely researched British newspapers,
looking into such matters as the reporting of boxing deaths. Hence, he notes
that historically the word ‘boxing’ can mean ‘a box for your lunch, a slap to the
3 This is why certain schools of discourse analysis disavow any debt to deconstruction, and even de-
nounce it, claiming that you can’t do discourse studies using deconstruction (for a discussion, see
Akerstrøm Andersen 2003). As certain radical or deconstructive discourse theorists used to say: this is
because deconstruction is a condition of possibility for discourse analysis that is by the same token a condi-
tion of its impossibility. Hence the problems.
4 All quotations from Svinth are from email communication in June 2017.
ears, a brawl at the pub, or a betting occasion outside of town. The Americans
are worse’, he adds: synonyms for boxer ‘include bully, shoulder-hitter, pugi-
list, pug’, and more. ‘And even in Britain, during mid-Victorian times, the pa-
pers sometimes made the distinction between bare-knuckle boxers and glove
fighters.’
Consequently, Svinth recommends that to establish anything about the an-
cestral terms and practices preceding today’s ‘martial arts’, one should search
databases such as newspaper archives using terms that would be ‘very po-
litically incorrect’ today. ‘For instance’, he suggests, ‘search “Jap wrestling”,
“Chinamen AND boxing”, “Hindoo AND stick fighting”, and so on’. Political
incorrectness in search terms must be embraced—as he notes, ‘Jack Johnson
was not described in kind terms in the sporting press of 1910.’ In addition,
Svinth points out, old martial arts stories may be organized by terms as di-
verse as ‘old Samurai art’, ‘antagonistics’, or ‘assaults-at-arms’. In the 1920s,
terms like ‘all-in fighting’ and ‘dirty fighting’ emerged, along with ‘commando
tactics’. ‘Judo’ was also as likely to mean ‘dirty fighting’ as Kodokan judo. ‘Then
as now’, writes Svinth:
the distinction between theatrical and practical use was often not remarked.
Thus, you’ll see Chinese street entertainers and sword dancers, Indian dacoit
and fakirs, Turkish strongmen, and so on, all doing what we’d today call ‘martial
art’, but were then viewed as curios . . . [Similarly] circus and music hall [has long
been] a place to look for feats of swordsmanship, archery, stick fighting, and so
on. The British booth fighters and the Australian tent fighters are straight out of
this tradition.
Then there is the time-honoured problem of variant spellings. The way we

spell judo, jujutsu, capoeira, taiji, and myriad other terms is a matter that is
still mired in difficulties and differences—and in some cases, will always be.
However, tackling the prehistory of the current discursive conjuncture—
defined as one in which the term ‘martial arts’ effectively needs no ex-
planation in order to be understood by most people—would be a very
different study. This project is interested in the formation and coalescence
of the present discursive conjuncture. Hence the research projects under-
pinning this work used the broadest of contemporary terms, in order to
find out where, when, and in what ways our current cultural terms ap-
peared and developed. This work is not a genealogy or history of any of
the precursors of today’s terms, concepts, or practices. It is about bringing
into focus the modes and manners of the appearance and features of the
present conjuncture.
Focus and Interpretation
Any project seeking to examine a discursive movement is pulled in two dif-

ferent directions: that of close textual analysis of the features and values of
individual texts, on the one hand, versus, on the other, that of assembling and
appraising the broader flow and movement of multiple texts all at the same
time. In an ideal world, one might hope that research would uncover all mar-
tial arts texts and that the written analysis of them would cover them all in
detail, with the construction of a fully formed picture based entirely on these
two stages. However, such an aim is problematic in ways famously set out in
the short story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (‘Del rigor en la ciencia’), by Jorge
Luis Borges. In this fictional narrative, cartographers sought to construct a
perfectly detailed map of a country. In the end, however, as a result of their
efforts, what they ended up producing was a map that was exactly the same
size as the terrain it sought to capture—thus losing the point and purpose
of having a map in the first place. This work does not attempt to produce a
‘Borgesian map’. It does not attempt to set out all of the features of everything.
Such a work would be a monster.
In any case, even if one could unearth and exhaustively analyse every text,
the picture painted would still only be one possible picture among others.
This is because any representation, even one attempting to be objective and
scholarly, unavoidably involves the active presence and work of creative and
inventive interpretation. Both micro-textual and macro-historical or discur-
sive analyses draw inferences, make connections, and propose ways to make
sense of things. Even were we to have all the facts or data to hand, the analysis
of that material could not but involve selective combination, connection, and
interrelation, and hence some kind of subjective addition or creative manipu-
lation, also known as interpretation. (It deserves mention that ‘facts’ and ‘data’
are neither natural nor neutral phenomena themselves, but rather are already
selected, moulded, organized, and interpreted ‘outcomes’, or indeed construc-
tions in their own right: Barry 2001.)
So, the problem remains one of how to navigate or negotiate the trade-off
between micro-textual analysis of details and establishing anything like a
macro-discursive ‘bird’s eye’ overview. In order to do justice to the analysis,
interpretation, and evaluation of popular cultural representations of mar-
tial arts, I prefer to devote as much time and space as my analysis requires
to selected texts singled out for consideration. In other words, I prefer what
might be termed the ‘close textual analysis’ of selected key texts. As such, my
preferred approach differs from some approaches to discourse analysis, his-
tory, or longitudinal sociological studies that prefer to operate on a macro
scale, whether that takes the form of composing large-scale narratives, or

whether it takes the form of collating and translating texts into data, and
trading in comparisons of numbers. I prefer to examine the specific details
of selected texts and to ‘read outwards’ from them, into the cultural contexts
of their creation, reception, and circulation, as well as comparing and con-
trasting specific aspects with features of other texts.
Of course, both macro (discursive) and micro (textual) approaches are val-
uable in establishing an understanding of culture and society. But both kinds
of approach have pitfalls and limitations. On the one hand, a problem with
analyses that marshal huge bodies of material is that they cannot do justice
to the textures, subtleties, and complexities of individual texts. On the other,
a risk with close textual analysis is that a sense of context and of proportion
can be lost. Some close analyses treat texts as if they are the centre of the uni-
verse; others, as if they exist in a vacuum. Many questions of selection and
significance can remain unanswered, such as why a particular text has been
chosen; on what grounds it warranted being singled out and given attention
over other possible choices; what else is being ignored or overlooked by fo-
cusing on this case; what else was going on before, during, and after its ap-
pearance; and so on.
The best textual analyses extend ‘outwards’ to give reasons for their choices
and to discuss important contextual cultural issues, such as what went ‘into’
the text, how those elements were combined, what it gave rise to, and so on.
Yet they are still open to the criticism that the pictures painted and conclu-
sions drawn may be unreliable because the texts used to draw the conclusions
were not selected on the basis of systematic or large-scale research of a his-
torical, cultural, or social context. They may have been chosen for arbitrary,
subjective, or even motivated reasons. Furthermore, micro-textual analysis of
one or two selected case studies can leave even the most enthusiastic reader
feeling like they want or need to know more about a historical and cultural
context, and that they would like to see it set out in the straightforward linear
manner of conventional narrative history.
Discontinuity
Because of this, Chapter 2 ‘Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts: From

Beginning at the Origin to the Origin of the Beginning’ attempts to set out a
linear history. It does so even though a key claim made within this work is that
history—at least in terms of media and popular culture—is not simply linear,
narrative, or consecutive. Rather, it is disjointed, episodic, non-cumulative,
and always incomplete. Popular culture is not a stable repository of living,

conscious memory, nor is it a singular and unified tale of linear ‘progress’
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Lyotard 1984). It is contradictory, multiple,
fragmented, reiterative, disjointed, inventive, and forgetful, both by turns and
at the same time. Many different things take place at once, but do so on dif-
ferent tracks, sometimes in complete ignorance of each other. Popular culture
is not a ‘field’ in which one can look up and look around and simply see every-
thing else that is going on. It is more like a hall of mirrors, with hidden walls,
blind spots, concatenations, reflections, and distortions. Academics such as
me use the word ‘discourse’, which can give the impression of a coherent and
logical conversation; but really a discourse is often a cacophony of discon-
nected babble. Moreover, discursive formations that have been constructed
and established over a period of time can be washed away as if they were sand-
castles built in the path of an incoming tide; painted over like a palimpsest; or
demolished and reconstructed like Lego. It may be possible to resurrect them,
but they will not be the same.
Of course, historical research can uncover many past realities. However,
it must be understood that just because past realities were realities, they did
not necessarily play any part in building the present. It is not just, to borrow
a phrase, that yesterday’s radical declarations are tomorrow’s t-shirt decor-
ations; it is also that yesterday’s obsessions can be simply washed away, like
stains from a t-shirt. (In this light, the current interest in reconstruction that
can be seen in many of the activities of HEMA, such as battle recreation, must
in a sense be regarded as postmodern rather than premodern activity.)
History Again
This work is interested in history only to the extent that it seeks to find the
historical ingredients that have gone into the formation and the makings of
the present discursive conjuncture—the period in which we can use the term
‘martial arts’ in the English language and simply assume that our interlocutors
will immediately or ‘intuitively’ grasp what is being evoked. This kind of ‘intu-
itive’ knowledge is not a matter of individual psychology; it is rather an index
of the frequency of occurrence (what Foucault often referred to as the ‘reg-
ularity in dispersion’) and hence the cultural familiarity of a term. Research
suggests that, although the people we now so easily call martial artists had
been using the term ‘martial arts’ for some time, and although it had also been
used in the distant historical past to refer to any of the arts and skills of the
battlefield, in actual fact, in the British media and cultural context, the term
‘martial arts’—meaning the kind of things we take it to mean today—really

only enters into wider circulation in the 1970s. At that moment, ‘martial arts’
meant ‘Asian martial arts’, and it has taken quite some time since then for that
meaning to become unsettled, or even modified in meaning so that it might
include non-Asian approaches to armed and unarmed combat (Bowman
2017a; Wetzler 2017).
Given this, with this focus or ‘period’ in mind, a question that quickly arises
is how far back into the past one should look when exploring the construc-
tion or invention of the present. This problem will hardly permit a univocal
response—especially as evermore ancient and diverse historical and cul-
tural contexts are being unearthed in order to reconstruct ancient and lost
forms and practices and make them into lived realities, today, in the present.
Nonetheless, for reasons that are set out in Chapter 2, this work only discusses
self-defence, unarmed combat, and ‘martial arts’ as far back as the late 1890s.
Another question is how wide to cast the net. This study seeks principally
to explore the British context. But the ‘British’ martial arts context has always
been steeped in, heavily marked by, and arguably even constituted by the
traffic of texts emerging from all over the world, especially North America
and South East Asia. Hence my use of the image from the 1980s film Firefox in
the introduction to this book as a metaphor for the traffic across and response
within the British context.
These are some of the problems to be faced when trying to set out the broad
history of the emergence and flow or circuits of key popular cultural texts and
events. This may not be such a problem were the sole aim of this book to be
the setting out of a history, in which each chapter were to be devoted to a dif-
ferent era. But my aims are different, and require a range of different kinds of
approach and analysis in different chapters. In attempting to set out an ade-
quate indicative history and yet to keep it within the bounds of less than one
entire book in itself, there had to be a trade-off. In essence, attempting to write
a reasonably comprehensive history of texts whilst keeping it within limits so
as to leave enough space and time for more focused analyses in other chap-
ters meant that sustained micro-level analyses or attention to detail could not
be maintained throughout. Nor could time be spent on the consideration of
the complexities of how texts have been produced and consumed in different
ways at different times. In other words, in constructing an inclusive, expan-
sive, yet relatively concise and manageable historical overview of martial arts
in British popular culture, the price to be paid was the sacrifice of some de-
tailed textual analysis.
To negotiate these double binds, several of the following chapters give over-
views of the mainstream appearances and representations of martial arts in
British popular culture. They offer some commentary and analysis, with the
overarching aim of identifying patterns, styles, aesthetics, conventions, and
clichés in the representation of martial arts, and locating the key contours, co-
ordinates, or ‘colour palette’ of the discursive constellation—or range of ways
of representing (and hence ‘ways of seeing’) martial arts in popular culture.
While I did not want to devote this entire book to the setting out of a histor-
ical narrative, I have structured much of it in terms of historical chronology.
This is because I believe this to be an important first step for developing
our understanding of the invention of martial arts within popular culture.
Research into and the establishment of academic knowledge of martial arts
in popular culture (especially in the British context) has until now been sorely
lacking. This means that, although the narrative I set out is provisional, inev-
itably incomplete, and really only a framework to be used to help construct a
sense of the range of meanings and values placed on martial arts in the current
era, the elaboration of a narrative history of martial arts in British popular
culture is long overdue. My hope is that what I have done in the historical di-
mensions of each chapter can either be further fleshed out and extended by
subsequent studies, or contested, critiqued, challenged, or reinterpreted. The
‘history’ I set out is a preliminary mapping that seeks to indicate innovations,
patterns, tendencies, and regularities, in the spectrum or constellation of de-
pictions of martial arts.
Closing Caveats
Finally, before proceeding further, what follows must be approached in full

awareness of a few caveats. One is that popular cultural history in the media
age is, in a way, non-linear. The publication, release, or first broadcast date
of a book, film, or television programme does not signal the birth, peak, or
end of its impacts or effects. Books, films, and television programmes can be
experienced, either for the first time, or with fresh eyes, or from different per-
spectives, at any subsequent date. Texts that flop on their initial release can
go on to become cult classics. Television programmes and films are endlessly
rerun, as well as redistributed in different formats and contexts; and the sig-
nificance and effects of phenomena can be immediate, belated, or ripple like
a shockwave in predictable and unpredictable ways through space and time.
VHS and Betamax video recorders did not become available in Britain until
the late 1970s, at which point many hitherto unknown or obscure earlier and/
or foreign films became much more widely available for the very first time,
and often to a very much younger generation than any who had encountered
such texts (in cinemas) before. The internet may have begun to become avail-
able through the 1990s, but YouTube was not founded until 2005. Thanks to
the internet and platforms like YouTube, ever more texts, aspects, ideas, and
elements of ‘martial arts’ culture and discourse continually become available
to more and more people, in no predetermined order and with no predeter-
mined ‘canon’, sequence, hierarchy, or filter. This terrain is in its own way the
deconstruction of linear history.
Another caveat relates to the notion of disjunction. We must remember
that pre-existing ways of representing martial arts may or may not influence
the construction of new representations. They may influence, but they cer-
tainly do not determine them. Representations can be complex constructions
that take inspiration and material from multiple and heterogeneous contexts.
Like all kinds of identities in the postmodern world (Jameson 1991), elements
are ‘poached’ (Jenkins 1992) from many different places and they are (re)as-
sembled into something new through processes of ‘bricolage’ (Certeau 1984;
1997). And this happens in no particular order.
Furthermore, there is no simple way of objectively measuring the ‘influ-
ence’ or ‘effects’ of any given text or event. One could undertake any of many
kinds of audience research to try to establish the influence and effects of given
films, books, or programmes; or one might carry out comparative analyses
of the intertextual communications, relays, and referrals between and across
texts, in order to establish a sense of the effect of one text on the production
landscape; and so on. All approaches have value, but no single approach is
completely compelling.
This present work tends to follow the intertextual approach. Texts are ex-
plored and related to each other in terms of reflections upon their similar-
ities and differences. I have neither undertaken any formal research that asks
those involved in the production of texts about their decisions, nor any audi-
ence research that asks viewers, listeners, or readers what they make of, feel
about, value, or do with the texts they experience. This is not to say I have not
made enquiries or discussed any of this with people. On the contrary, in my
own ongoing formal and informal research into martial arts in popular cul-
ture, I have regularly over the years asked people about which martial arts
texts (films, books, cartoons, games, etc.) they have most enjoyed and which
they think may have had most influence or impact on them. What I have been
most surprised by is how few texts are mentioned and credited with having
left an enduring impression on people from all over the world. The texts that
are most mentioned actually amount to a rather short list of internationally
famous Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Japanese films, television programmes,
and computer games.
This may beg the question of the value of a wider exploration of the ‘non-
canonical’, marginal, unknown, or obscure martial arts texts of popular
culture. Obviously, we should be aware of the significance and effects of an al-
most universally agreed ‘canon’ of core texts. But that does not mean that non-
canonical, marginal works are of no importance. As has been shown in studies
that have challenged, deconstructed, critiqued, and expanded the canons of
‘great works’ or ‘great thinkers’ that for a long time structured such fields as the
study of literature and philosophy, there are huge problems associated with
regarding the movement of literary production or philosophical thought in
terms of a kind of baton-passing process from one Great Mind (normally that
of a white man) to the next Great (white, male) Mind. This is a value-driven
and value-reinforcing approach, often based on a simplistic conception of de-
velopment, one that actively serves to exclude or downgrade the status not
only of alternatives (women, say, or non-white men) but also the reality of
multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity.
Nonetheless, it is clear that mass media texts have mass (or ‘massifying’)
effects. Throughout the twentieth century, more and more people in more
and more parts of the world became more likely and more able to encounter
the same texts: big budget movies became increasingly transnational; televi-
sion series were internationally disseminated; computer games were sold in-
creasingly globally. Indeed, it deserves to be noted that it was a martial arts
film—the nostalgic millennial Chinese martial arts (wuxia) film, Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee 2000)—that is widely regarded as a landmark mile-
stone in the becoming transnational of film and of hitherto ‘regional’ film in-
dustries (Eperjesi 2004; Wang 2005). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an
early transnational film that presaged many changes in the shape of things
to come. The same can be said for computer games, TV show formats, and
other kinds of ‘massifying’ media that enable (or oblige) people to encounter
the same images, texts, and activities, transnationally. Conversely, of course,
with the emergence of the internet, and the fragmentation and exponential
expansion of modes and materials of consumption/interaction, many forms
of ‘massification’ have begun to be eroded and transformed. So, forces push
and pull in contrary directions at the same time.
In what follows, I have given some attention to many of the most well-known
and frequently referenced mass media texts from both Asia and America, as
well as to various (often lesser-known or less frequently mentioned) texts pro-
duced or circulating in the British context. Big films, computer games, and
certain television programmes, books, and magazines produced in the United
States or Asia are of necessity included, simply because to exclude them would
be to paint an obviously distorted picture of martial arts in the British context.
However, my sense is that it is important not to overlook the fact that many
minor or obscure texts still happened, even if they may have been all but for-
gotten. My account tries to capture both ends of this spectrum (the widely
remembered and the largely forgotten), even though the aim was not to find,
catalogue, and list every martial arts film, book, programme, magazine, ad-
vert, or news story that ever happened in the world, nor even in the United
Kingdom. It was rather to get a clearer sense, based on textual evidence, of
the landscape of media and cultural martial arts texts in the United Kingdom
throughout the twentieth and into the early twenty-first century, in order to
sketch out some of the coordinates, contours, and features of martial arts as
they have been constructed in media and popular cultural texts. However,
even though ‘martial arts’ as we know the entity arguably caught on and took
off thanks to film in the early 1970s, it was not born of nothing. The question
is, what ingredients coalesced into ‘martial arts’?
The Following Chapters
Chapter 2, ‘Modernity, Media and Martial Arts: From Beginning at the Origin
to the Origin of the Beginning’, poses the question of when and where the
analysis of the discursive entity ‘martial arts’ should begin. In exploring this,
the chapter notes the prominence of origin stories in traditionalist martial
arts, and interrogates their roles and functions. This leads to a discussion of
what Rey Chow called ‘primitive passions’ in a deracinated, postmodern, and
postcolonial world. All of this prompts a critique of a current popular and ac-
ademic orientation that the chapter diagnoses as a widespread fixation, which
it calls the ‘origin destination’.
What is meant by the oxymoronic term ‘origin destination’ is the elevation
of the status of the origin to such an extent that it becomes the principal in-
terest of the academic work. Rather than fixate on mythologized origins in this
way, the chapter proposes alternative ways to engage with history. It does so by
way of a discussion of the famous case of a late Victorian combat system called
Bartitsu, made famous by a brief mention in a Sherlock Holmes novel and also
by the fact that it was taught to women who would go on to become important
figures in the Suffragette movement. This example is important not only be-
cause it shines light on the emergence of interest in self-defence in contexts of
emergent urban modernity, but also because the recent resurgence of interest
in Bartitsu casts light on the contemporary postmodern desire for roots.
After reflecting on the convulsions and tectonic shifts in attitudes and ap-
proaches 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 ap-
pearance of arts such as judo and karate in various media. It analyses memo-
rable 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.
Key among influential texts in the movement of martial arts texts into pop-
ular consciousness is the 1974 international hit disco song, ‘Kung Fu Fighting’
by Carl Douglas. Curiously, despite the significance and status of this song
(both in terms of the emergence of disco and martial arts), remarkably little
serious academic attention has ever been given to it—even within books and
articles that use its instantly recognizable lyrics as part of their own titles.
Chapter 4, ‘Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing: Inventing Popular Martial Arts
Aesthetics’ seeks to redress this historical oversight. The chapter 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, in-
vestment in, and involvement or encounters with ‘other cultures’.
As mentioned, 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 pre-
cludes 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 estab-
lish 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.
Having taken the time to identify several discursive regularities and recur-
ring motifs in martial arts imagery, Chapter 6 ‘The Meaning of Martial Arts’
moves further into delineating a discursive constellation. This chapter com-
bines 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 dis-
cussion 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 femi-
nism, before returning to the fragmented and fragmentary character of en-
counters with and representations of martial arts.
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. (‘TKD’ is a common abbreviation of
‘taekwondo’, a martial art known for its spectacular kicks.) 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 relation-
ships with and (mis)understandings of Asian countries and cultures. Once
again, ninjas feature prominently. 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. Martial arti-
ness also features in videos that involve what might be called ‘sci-feminism’,
as well as in the postmodern genre that might be called the Eastern Space
Western. On the other hand, regressive representations of martial arts also
feature in some large-budget mainstream pop, rap, and RnB music, such
as recent videos by Nicki Minaj, Coldplay-featuring-Rihanna, and others.
Overall, the chapter argues that martial arts are appealing material for visual
texts like music videos because they showcase the body in fascinating mo-
tion, and it concludes with a discussion of the blurred lines between martial
arts like capoeira and music video staples like breakdancing—both of whose
histories have been intertwined since their emergence in US–Brazilian cul-

tural encounters.
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 cul-
tural confusion or indifference about the specificities of Chinese and Japanese
culture and martial arts. However, at the same time, still other adverts com-
bine a nostalgia for 1970s Hong Kong aesthetics in adverts that thoroughly
eroticize the Asian male lead—something that film critics have often criti-
cized Hollywood for failing to do. The chapter also examines other adverts
in which martial artsy combat is eroticized, orientalized and/or depicted as
ludicrous. Ending with the analysis of an advert for Tena Men underwear
which concludes with one character saying to another, ‘Why are you like this?’,
the chapter ends by proposing to level this question to both traditionalist and
modern martial arts in the final two chapters.
Chapter 9 examines ‘The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts’, and ex-
plores the status of the imagined binaries that often structure interest in
‘traditional East Asian’ arts, as well as the desire for authenticity and the prob-
lematic 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 the-
orized as reiteration). To provide evidence to support what might otherwise
be called an entirely theoretical argument, the chapter concludes with a dis-
cussion of the changing form, content, and characteristics of the traditionalist
Chinese martial art of taijiquan (tai chi).
In the current discursive conjunction, modern and mixed martial arts such
as MMA are often taken to be the polar opposites of so-called traditional Asian
martial arts. The book’s final chapter, Chapter 10, turns to modern ‘Western’
MMA in a reflection on ‘Inventing Martial Subjects: Toxic Masculinity, MMA,
and Media Representation’. 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 focused on working-class masculinity. From here, the chapter
enters into a reflection on the orientations of gender studies, particularly in
relation to martial arts and gendered subjects, arguing that such subjects are
invented in academic as much as in media and cultural discourses. Following
the work of political theorist Ernesto Laclau, the chapter argues that an anal-
ysis of the formation or invention of political identities is a crucial task for
media, cultural, and martial arts studies. This is a task that requires atten-
tion not just to local, physical, embodied, or ‘concrete’ contexts and prac-
tices ‘proper’, but one that must also take seriously the places and functions
of transnational media culture, and subjects and objects of discourse and of
study across all manner of media, medium, and cultural text and context.
After all of this, the book closes with a concluding reflection on the ground
that has been covered and the ground that remains to be covered. Martial arts
‘is’ or ‘are’ a comparatively recent invention, whose transformations and re-
inventions have already been profound. The final question is what remains
to happen ‘after the invention’. But first, we must establish a beginning from
which to start.
2
Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts
From Beginning at the Origin to the Origin
of the Beginning
This chapter poses the question of when and where the analysis of the discur-
sive entity ‘martial arts’ should begin. In broaching this, we first interrogate
the role and function of origin stories in traditionalist martial arts, leading to
a discussion of what Rey Chow called the ‘primitive passions’ that emerge in
our deracinated, postmodern, and postcolonial world. All of this prompts a
critique of a current popular and academic orientation that the chapter diag-
noses as a widespread fixation on what it calls the ‘origin destination’. What
is meant by the oxymoronic term ‘origin destination’ is the elevation of the
status of the origin to such an extent that it becomes the principal interest of
the scholarly work. Rather than fixate on mythologized origins in this way, the
chapter proposes alternative ways to engage with martial arts history. It does
so by way of a discussion of the famous case of a late Victorian combat system
called Bartitsu, made famous by a brief mention in a Sherlock Holmes novel
and also by the fact that it was taught to women who would go on to become
important figures in the Suffragette movement. This example is important
not only because it shines light on the emergence of interest in self-defence in
contexts of emergent urban modernity, but also because the recent resurgence
of interest in Bartitsu casts further light on the contemporary postmodern de-
sire for roots.
Origin Stories
To begin at the beginning: Chinese martial arts are often believed to have
their origins in the Shaolin Temple. However, they do not. Some are said to
have originated in a second Shaolin Temple. This did not exist. These original
martial arts are said to have spread after one or the other temple was burned
down and the surviving monks were scattered to the winds. This, of course,
could not have happened. The transmission of what became various styles
is believed to have derived from these legendary figures, many of whom did
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197540336.001.0001.
Another random document with
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THE OLD STORY.
There is without doubt a large criminal and semi-criminal class
among colored people. This is but another way of saying that the
social uplift of a group of freedmen is a serious task. But it is also
true, and painfully true, that the crime imputed carelessly and
recklessly against colored people gives an impression of far greater
criminality than the facts warrant.
Take, for instance, a typical case: A little innocent schoolgirl is
brutally murdered in New Jersey. A Negro vagabond is arrested.
Immediately the news is heralded from East to West, from North to
South, in Europe and Asia, of the crime of this black murderer.
Immediately a frenzied, hysterical mob gathers and attempts to
lynch the poor wretch. He is spirited away and the public is almost
sorry that he has escaped summary justice. Without counsel or
friends, the man is shut up in prison and tortured to make him
confess. “They did pretty near everything to me except kill me,”
whispered the wretched man to the first friend he saw.
Finally, after the whole black race in America had suffered
aspersion for several weeks, sense begins to dawn in Jersey. After all,
what proof was there against this man? He was lazy, he had been in
jail for alleged theft from gypsies, he was good natured, and he drank
whiskey. That was all. Yet he stayed in jail under no charge and
under universal censure. The coroner’s jury found no evidence to
indict him. Still he lay in jail. Finally the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People stepped in and said, “What are you
holding this man for?” The Public Prosecutor got red in the face and
vociferated. Then he went downtown, and when the habeas corpus
proceedings came and the judge asked again: “Why are you holding
this man?” the prosecutor said chirpily, “For violating election laws,”
and brought a mass of testimony. Then the judge discharged the
prisoner from the murder charge and congratulated the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People—but the man is
still in jail.
Such justice is outrageous and such methods disgraceful. Black
folk are willing to shoulder their own sins, but the difference between
a vagabond and a murderer is too tremendous to be lightly ignored.
“SOCIAL EQUALITY.”
At last we have a definition of the very elusive phrase “Social
Equality” as applied to the Negro problem. In stating their grievances
colored people have recently specified these points:
1. Disfranchisement, even of educated Negroes.
2. Curtailment of common school training.
3. Confinement to “Ghettos.”
4. Discrimination in wages.
5. Confinement to menial employment.
6. Systematic insult of their women.
7. Lynching and miscarriage of justice.
8. Refusal to recognize fitness “in political or industrial life.”
9. Personal discourtesy.
Southern papers in Charlotte, Richmond, New Orleans and
Nashville have with singular unanimity hastened to call this
complaint an unequivocal demand for “social equality,” and as such
absolutely inadmissible. We are glad to have a frank definition,
because we have always suspected this smooth phrase. We
recommend on this showing that hereafter colored men who hasten
to disavow any desire for “social equality” should carefully read the
above list of disabilities which social inequality would seem to
prescribe.
ASHAMED.
Any colored man who complains of the treatment he receives in
America is apt to be faced sooner or later by the statement that he is
ashamed of his race.
The statement usually strikes him as a most astounding piece of
illogical reasoning, to which a hot reply is appropriate.
And yet notice the curious logic of the persons who say such
things. They argue:
White men alone are men. This Negro wants to be a man. Ergo he
wants to be a white man.
Their attention is drawn to the efforts of colored people to be
treated decently. This minor premise therefore attracts them. But the
major premise—the question as to treating black men like white men
—never enters their heads, nor can they conceive it entering the
black man’s head. If he wants to be a man he must want to be white,
and therefore it is with peculiar complacency that a Tennessee paper
says of a dark champion of Negro equality: “He bitterly resents his
Negro blood.”
Not so, O Blind Man. He bitterly resents your treatment of Negro
blood. The prouder he is, or has a right to be, of the blood of his black
fathers, the more doggedly he resists the attempt to load men of that
blood with ignominy and chains. It is race pride that fights for
freedom; it is the man ashamed of his blood who weakly submits and
smiles.
JESUS CHRIST IN BALTIMORE.
It seems that it is not only Property that is screaming with fright at
the Black Spectre in Baltimore, but Religion also. Two churches
founded in the name of Him who “put down the mighty from their
seats and exalted them of low degree” are compelled to move. Their
palatial edifices filled with marble memorials and Tiffany windows
are quite useless for the purposes of their religion since black folk
settled next door. Incontinently they have dropped their Bibles and
gathered up their priestly robes and fled, after selling their property
to colored people for $125,000 in good, cold cash.
Where are they going? Uptown. Up to the wealthy and exclusive
and socially select. There they will establish their little gods again,
and learned prelates with sonorous voices will ask the echoing pews:
“How can the Church reach the working man?”
Why not ask the working man? Why not ask black people, and
yellow people, and poor people, and all the people from whom such
congregations flee in holy terror? The church that does not run from
the lowly finds the lowly at its doors, and there are some such
churches in the land, but we fear that their number in Baltimore is
not as great as should be.
“EXCEPT SERVANTS.”
The noticeable reservation in all attempts, North and South, to
separate black folk and white is the saving phrase, “Except servants.”
Are not servants colored? Is the objection, then, to colored people
or to colored people who are not servants? In other words, is this
race prejudice inborn antipathy or a social and economic caste?
SOCIAL CONTROL
By JANE ADDAMS, of Hull House
I always find it very difficult to write upon the great race problem
which we have in America. I think, on the whole, that the most
satisfactory books on the subject are written by people outside of
America. This is certainly true of two books, “White Capital and
Black Labor,” by the Governor of Jamaica, and William Archer’s
book entitled “Afro-America.” Although the latter is inconclusive, it
at least gives one the impression that the man who has written it has
seen clearly into the situation, and that, I suppose, is what it is very
difficult for any American to do.
One thing, however, is clear to all of us, that not only in the South,
but everywhere in America, a strong race antagonism is asserting
itself, which has various modes of lawless and insolent expression.
The contemptuous attitude of the so-called superior race toward the
inferior results in a social segregation of each race, and puts the one
race group thus segregated quite outside the influences of social
control represented by the other. Those inherited resources of the
race embodied in custom and kindly intercourse which make much
more for social restraint than does legal enactment itself are thus
made operative only upon the group which has inherited them, and
the newer group which needs them most is practically left without.
Thus in every large city we have a colony of colored people who have
not been brought under social control, and a majority of the white
people in the same community are tacitly endeavoring to keep from
them those restraints which can be communicated only through
social intercourse. One could easily illustrate this lack of inherited
control by comparing the experiences of a group of colored girls with
those of a group representing the daughters of Italian immigrants, or
of any other South European peoples. The Italian girls very much
enjoy the novelty of factory work, the opportunity to earn money and
to dress as Americans do, but this new freedom of theirs is carefully
guarded. Their mothers seldom give them permission to go to a party
in the evening, and never without chaperonage. Their fathers
consider it a point of honor that their daughters shall not be alone on
the streets after dark. The daughter of the humblest Italian receives
this care because her parents are but carrying out social traditions. A
group of colored girls, on the other hand, are quite without this
protection. If they yield more easily to the temptations of a city than
any other girls, who shall say how far the lack of social restraint is
responsible for their downfall? The Italian parents represent the
social traditions which have been worked out during centuries of
civilization, and which often become a deterrent to progress through
the very bigotry with which they cling to them; nevertheless, it is
largely through these customs and manners that new groups are
assimilated into civilization.
Added to this is the fact that a decent colored family, if it is also
poor, often finds it difficult to rent a house save one that is
undesirable, because situated near a red-light district, and the family
in the community least equipped with social tradition is forced to
expose its daughters to the most flagrantly immoral conditions the
community permits. This is but one of the many examples of the
harmful effects of race segregation which might be instanced.
Another result of race antagonism is the readiness to irritation
which in time characterizes the intercourse of the two races. We
stupidly force one race to demand as a right from the other those
things which should be accorded as a courtesy, and every meeting
between representatives of the two races is easily characterized by
insolence and arrogance. To the friction of city life, and the
complications of modern intercourse, is added this primitive race
animosity which should long since have been outgrown. When the
white people in a city are tacitly leagued against the colored people
within its borders, the result is sure to be disastrous, but there are
still graver dangers in permitting the primitive instinct to survive
and to become self-assertive. When race antagonism manifests itself
through lynching, it defiantly insists that it is superior to all those
laws which have been gradually evolved during thousands of years,
and which form at once the record and the instrument of civilization.
The fact that this race antagonism enables the men acting under its
impulsion to justify themselves in their lawlessness constitutes the
great danger of the situation. The men claim that they are executing
a primitive retribution which precedes all law, and in this belief they
put themselves in a position where they cannot be reasoned with,
although this dangerous manifestation must constantly be reckoned
with as a deterrent to progress and a menace to orderly living.
Moreover, this race antagonism is very close to the one thing in
human relations which is uglier than itself, namely, sex antagonism,
and in every defense made in its behalf an appeal to the latter
antagonism is closely interwoven. Many men in every community
justify violence when it is committed under the impulsion of these
two antagonisms, and others carelessly assert that great laws of
human intercourse, first and foremost founded upon justice and
right relations between man and man, should thus be disregarded
and destroyed.
If the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
will soberly take up every flagrant case of lawbreaking, and if it allow
no withdrawal of constitutional rights to pass unchallenged, it will
perform a most useful service to America and for the advancement of
all its citizens. Many other opportunities may be open in time to such
an association, but is not this its first and most obvious obligation?
THE TEACHER.
By Leslie Pinckney Hill.
Lord, who am I to teach the way

To little children day by day,
So prone myself to go astray?
I teach them Knowledge, but I know

How faint they flicker, and how low
The candles of my knowledge glow.
I teach them Power to will and do,

But only now to learn anew
My own great weakness through and through.
I teach them Love for all mankind

And all God’s creatures; but I find
My love comes lagging still behind.
Lord, if their guide I still must be,

O let the little children see
The teacher leaning hard on thee!
Employment of Colored Women in
Chicago
From a Study Made by the Chicago School of Civics and

Philanthropy
In considering the field of employment for colored women, the

professional women must be discussed separately. They admit fewer
difficulties and put a brave face on the matter, but in any case their
present position was gained only after a long struggle. The education
is the less difficult part. The great effort is to get the work after
having prepared themselves for it. The Negro woman, like her white
sister, is constantly forced to choose between a lower wage or no
work. The pity is that her own people do not know the colored girl
needs their help nor realize how much they could do for her.
Two of the musicians found the struggle too hard and were
compelled to leave Chicago. One girl of twenty-three, a graduate of
the Chicago Conservatory of Music, is playing in a low concert hall in
one of the worst sections of the city, from 8 in the evening till 4 in the
morning. Her wages are $18 a week, and with this she supports a
father and mother and younger sister.
There are from fifteen to twenty colored teachers in the public
schools of Chicago. This information was obtained from the office of
the superintendent, where it was said no record was kept of the
number of colored teachers. When they are given such a place they
are always warned that they are likely to have difficulty. As a rule
they are in schools where the majority of the children are Negroes.
They are all in the grades, but they say that their opportunities for
promotion are equal to those of white women. Indeed, they say that
there are two places where they are not discriminated against
because of their color. One is in the public schools, the other is under
the Civil Service Commission.
However, the professional women do not have the greatest
difficulty. The real barriers are met by the women who have had only
an average education—girls who have finished high school, or
perhaps only the eighth grade. These girls, if they were white, would
find employment at clerical and office work in Chicago’s department
stores, mail order houses and wholesale stores. But these positions
are absolutely closed to the Negro girl. She has no choice but
housework.
When the object of the inquiry was explained to one woman she
said: “Why, no one wants a Negro to work for him. I’ll show you—
look in the newspaper.” And she produced a paper with its columns
of advertisements for help wanted. “See, not one person in this whole
city has asked for a Negro to work for him.”
A great many of the colored women find what they call “day work”
most satisfactory. This means from eight to nine hours a day at some
kind of housework, cleaning, washing, ironing or dusting. This the
Negro women prefer to regular positions as maids, because it allows
them to go at night to their families. The majority of the women who
do this work receive $1.50, with 10 cents extra for carfare. There was
a higher grade of day work for which the pay was $2 a day besides
the carfare. This included the packing of trunks, washing of fine linen
and lace curtains, and even some mending.
The records of the South Side Free Employment Agency showed
that the wages of colored women were uniformly lower than those of
white women. Of course, there is no way of judging of ability by
records, but where the white cooks received $8 per week the Negro
cooks were paid $7, and where the white maids received $6,
sometimes, but not as frequently as in the case of the cooks, the
Negro maid received less. One dollar and a half was paid for “day
work.” At the colored employment agency which is run in connection
with the Frederic Douglas Centre they have many more requests for
maids than they have girls to fill the places. Good places with high
wages are sometimes offered, but the girls are more and more
demanding “day work” and refusing to work by the week. At the
South Side Free Employment Agency during the months of January,
February and March of this year forty-two positions for colored
women were found.[2] These forty-two positions were filled by thirty-
six women, some of them coming back to the office two or three
times during the three months. The superintendent said it was
difficult to find places for the colored women who applied, and they
probably succeeded in placing only about 25 per cent. of them. In the
opinion of those finding the work for the girls in this office, the
reason for the difficulties they encounter are the fact that they do not
remain long in one place and have a general reputation for
dishonesty. The fundamental cause of the discrimination by
employers against them is racial prejudice either in the employer
himself or in his customers.
2. 454 white women in the same time.
One girl who has only a trace of colored blood was able to secure a
position as salesgirl in a store. After she had been there a long time
she asked for an increase in wages, such as had been allowed the
white girls, but the request was refused and she was told that she
ought to be thankful that they kept her at all.
In many cases, especially when the women were living alone, the
earnings, plus the income from the lodgers, barely covered the rent.
When they work by the day they rarely work more than four days a
week. Sometimes the amount they gave as their weekly wage fell
short of even paying the rent, but more often the rent was covered
and a very small margin left to live on.
Such treatment has discouraged the Negro woman. She has
accepted the conditions and seldom makes any real effort to get into
other sorts of work. The twelfth question on the schedule, “What
attempts have you made to secure other kinds of work in Chicago or
elsewhere?” was usually answered by a question: “What’s the use of
trying to get work when you know you can’t get it?”
The colored women are like white women in the same grade of life.
They do not realize the need of careful training, and they do not
appreciate the advantages of specialization in their work. But the
Negro woman is especially handicapped, for she not only lacks
training but must overcome the prejudice against her color. Of the
270 women interviewed, 43 per cent. were doing some form of
housework for wages, yet all evidence of conscious training was
entirely lacking. This need must be brought home to them before
they can expect any real advancement.
A peculiar problem presents itself in connection with the
housework. Practically this is the only occupation open to Negro
women, and it is also the only occupation where one is not expected
to go home at night. This the Negroes insist on doing. They are
accused of having no family feeling, yet the fact remains that they
will accept a lower wage and live under far less advantageous
conditions for the sake of being free at night. That is why the “day
work” is so popular. Rather than live in some other person’s home
and get good wages for continued service, the colored woman prefers
to live in this way. She will have a tiny room, go out as many days a
week as she can get places, and pay for her room and part of her
board out of her earnings, which sometimes amount to only $3 or
$4.50 per week.
Occasionally laundry, sewing or hair work is done in their homes,
but the day work is almost universally preferred.
Many of the Negroes are so nearly white that they can be mistaken
for white girls, in which case they are able to secure very good
positions and keep them as long as their color is not known.
One girl worked for a fellowship at the Art Institute. Her work was
good and the place was promised her. In making out the papers she
said Negro, when asked her nationality, to the great astonishment of
the man in charge. He said he would have to look into the matter, but
the girl did not get the fellowship.
A young man, son of a colored minister in the city, had a position
in a business man’s office, kept the books, collected rents, etc. He
had a peculiar name, and one of the tenants remembered it in
connection with the boy’s father, who had all the physical
characteristics of the Negro. The tenant made inquiries and reported
the matter to the landlord, threatening to leave the building if he had
to pay rent to a Negro. The boy was discharged.
A colored girl, who was very light colored, said that more than
once she secured a place and the colored people themselves had told
the employer he had a “Negro” working for him. The woman with
whom she was living said: “It’s true every time. The Negroes are their
own worst enemies.”
To summarize, the isolation which is forced upon the Negro, both
in his social and his business life, constitutes one of the principal
difficulties which he encounters. As far as the colored woman is
concerned, as we have shown, the principal occupations which are
open to her are domestic service and school teaching. This leaves a
large number of women whose education has given them ambitions
beyond housework, who are not fitted to compete with northern
teachers and yet cannot obtain clerical work because they are
Negroes. Certain fields in which there is apparently an opportunity
for the colored women are little tried. For example, sewing is
profitable and there is little feeling against the employment of Negro
seamstresses, and yet few follow the dressmaking profession.
Without doubt one fundamental reason for the difficulties the
colored woman meets in seeking employment is her lack of industrial
training. The white woman suffers from this also, but the colored
woman doubly so. The most hopeful sign is the growing conviction
on the part of the leading Negro women of the city that there is need
of co-operation between them and the uneducated and unskilled,
and that they are trying to find some practical means to give to these
women the much-needed training for industrial life.
THE BURDEN
If blood be the price of liberty,

Lord God, we have paid in full.
COLORED MEN LYNCHED WITHOUT TRIAL.

1885 78
1886 71
1887 80
1888 95
1889 95
1890 90
1891 121
1892 155
1893 154
1894 134
1895 112
1896 80
1897 122
1898 102
1899 84
1900 107
1901 107
1902 86
1903 86
1904 83
1905[3] 60
1906[3] 60
1907[3] 60
1908[3] 80
1909 73
1910[4] 50
Total 2,425
3. Estimated.
4. Estimated to date.
The policy usually carried out consistently in the South of refusing

the colored woman the courtesies accorded the white woman leads to
some unfortunate results. One of the courtesies refused is the title of
“Mrs.” or “Miss.” Thus a Kentucky newspaper, in its recent
educational news, notes “the resignation of Mrs. Mattie Spring Barr
as a substitute teacher and the unanimous election of Miss Ella
Williams,” while a few paragraphs below it says that “Principal
Russell of the Russell Negro School asked that Lizzie Brooks be
promoted to the position of regular teacher and that Annie B. Jones
be made a substitute.” Here we have two groups of women doing
similar important work for the community, yet the group with Negro
blood is denied the formality of address that every other section of
the country gives to the teacher in a public school.
How much the South loses by this policy is shown by a

Northerner’s experience in the office of one of the philanthropic
societies. Two probation officers, volunteers, were going out to their
work. The secretary of the society addressed the first, a white
woman, as Mrs. Brown: the second, a little middle-aged black
woman, he called Mary. When they had left the Northerner
questioned the difference in address. “I couldn’t call a nigger Mrs. or
Miss.,” the secretary expostulated. “It would be impossible.” “But
here in your own city,” the Northerner answered, “I happen to know
a number of educated colored girls, some of them college graduates,
who have a desire for social service. Under you they might learn the
best methods of charitable work, but they would not care to be called
‘Annie’ or ‘Jane’ by a young white man. Can you afford to lose such
helpers as these?”
He had but one answer. “It would never do for me to say Mrs. or
Miss to a nigger. It would be impossible.”
Throughout the country there are a number of colored postal

clerks. These men, with others in the service, belong to the Mutual
Benefit Association. At a recent meeting in Chicago the delegates to
this Mutual Benefit Association voted in the future to admit only
clerks of the Caucasian race. According to one of the colored clerks,
the meeting that passed this vote was “packed,” colored members
receiving no notice to elect delegates to it.
The black servant is more acceptable to some people than the

educated colored man. As an instance of this is Mr. U. of
Washington, a highly cultivated Negro of some means. As owner of a
cottage and a few acres of land in a small Virginia town, he good-
naturedly allowed an old black woman to live rent-free upon his
place. On her death he went down to claim the property, but found
the woman’s daughter had put in a counter claim. The case went to
court, and in his plea before the jury the woman’s lawyer said: “Are
you going to take property away from this black mammy’s daughter
to give it to a smart nigger from Washington?” And despite Mr. U.’s
former yearly payment of taxes, despite the deed which he himself
held, he lost his suit.
In Wilcox County Ala., there are 10,758 Negro children and 2,000
white children of school age, making a total population of 12,758.
The per capita allowance for each child in the State this year is $2.56.
According to the recent apportionment of the school fund on this
basis, Wilcox County receives $32,660.48. Of this amount the 10,758
Negro children have been allowed one-fifth, or $6,532.09, about 60
cents each, while the 2,000 white children receive the remaining
four-fifths, or $26,128.39, about $13 each. Further investigation
shows that only 1,000 of the 10,758 Negro children are in school,
leaving 6,758 with absolutely no provision for obtaining even a
common school education.
TALKS ABOUT WOMEN
NUMBER TWO By Mrs. JOHN E. MILHOLLAND
A most interesting and instructive morning was given at the

Berkeley Lyceum on Wednesday, December 7, under the auspices of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The
weather was bitterly cold, and although the great fall of snow during
the night had made getting about a not only troublesome but
dangerous experience, the little theatre was well filled with many
well-known women in sympathy with the cause and interested in all
sorts of activities for progress. The chairman, Mr. John Haynes
Holmes, introduced Madame Hackley, who gave the musical part of
the program, and did it well with her customary finish and
appreciation.
Madam Hackley was trained in Paris, and gave several French
selections with great skill.
Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, the speaker, was most enthusiastically
received, and made, as usual, a most effective and touching speech,
to which her audience listened with not only interest but surprise, as
many present had never dreamed of the struggles of these women in
their efforts for educational advancement.
Without doubt Mrs. Terrell is one of the best orators we have to-
day. She has much dignity, with a very easy and fluent mode of
speaking. She is direct, and when, as on this occasion, she is talking
for the women of her race, her enthusiasm and sincerity carry
conviction to her listeners. When she had finished Mrs. Terrell was
warmly congratulated, and the enthusiastic daughter of the great
orator, Robert Ingersoll, Mrs. Walston R. Brown, declared that “Mrs.

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The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular

Culture Between Asia and America

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

1. Conceptual Foundations—​The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular

2. Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts: From Beginning at

3. Martial Arts into Media Culture 57

4. Everybody Was Kung Fu Citing: Inventing Popular Martial

5. From Linear History to Discursive Constellation 99

6. The Meaning of Martial Arts 129

7. I Want My TKD: Martial Arts in Music Videos 145

8. Martial Ads 177

9. The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts 193

10. Inventing Martial Subjects: Toxic Masculinity, MMA,

Conclusion: After the Invention 240

of Dr Darren Kelsey. The work presented on these occasions went on to ma-

(MMA) was provided by my former Ph.D. student, Dr Kyle Barrowman.

What Kind of Book Is This and Who Is It For?

micro-​organisms on a slide to symptoms within an entire (social) body. Put

Jargon versus Technical Language

Media History and Cultural Analysis

does not solely seek to provide a detailed or exhaustive narrative of events.

Representing Martial Arts in the Media

This line of thinking has fuelled numerous intellectual traditions, from

Introduction: ‘Mainly of East Asian Origin’

1920 Takenobu’s Japanese-​Eng. Dict. 119 Bugei, military arts (accomplishments);

In reality, the origins of the current discursive conjuncture, in which ‘mar-

Martial Arts as a Discursive Entity

discourse theory theorizes (and discourses upon), discourse theory itself is a

deconstructable. The question remains one of how to ascertain whether this

Pre-​Histories of Martial Arts

Then there is the time-​honoured problem of variant spellings. The way we

Focus and Interpretation

Any project seeking to examine a discursive movement is pulled in two dif-

scale, whether that takes the form of composing large-​scale narratives, or

Because of this, Chapter 2 ‘Modernity, Media, and Martial Arts: From

and always incomplete. Popular culture is not a stable repository of living,

‘martial arts’—​meaning the kind of things we take it to mean today—​really

Finally, before proceeding further, what follows must be approached in full

The Following Chapters

histories have been intertwined since their emergence in US–​Brazilian cul-

By JANE ADDAMS, of Hull House

By Leslie Pinckney Hill.

Lord, who am I to teach the way

I teach them Knowledge, but I know

I teach them Power to will and do,

I teach them Love for all mankind

Lord, if their guide I still must be,

From a Study Made by the Chicago School of Civics and

In considering the field of employment for colored women, the

If blood be the price of liberty,

COLORED MEN LYNCHED WITHOUT TRIAL.

The policy usually carried out consistently in the South of refusing

How much the South loses by this policy is shown by a

Throughout the country there are a number of colored postal

The black servant is more acceptable to some people than the

NUMBER TWO By Mrs. JOHN E. MILHOLLAND

A most interesting and instructive morning was given at the

You might also like

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Conceptual Foundations—The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular

micro-organisms on a slide to symptoms within an entire (social) body. Put

1920 Takenobu’s Japanese-Eng. Dict. 119 Bugei, military arts (accomplishments);

Pre-Histories of Martial Arts

Then there is the time-honoured problem of variant spellings. The way we

scale, whether that takes the form of composing large-scale narratives, or

‘martial arts’—meaning the kind of things we take it to mean today—really

histories have been intertwined since their emergence in US–Brazilian cul-