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Through popular movies starring Bruce Lee and songs like the disco hit "Kung Fu Fighting," martial arts have found a central place in the Western cultural imagination. But what would 'martial arts' be without the explosion of media texts and images that brought it to a wide audience in the late 1960s and early 1970s? In this examination of the media history of what we now call martial arts, author Paul Bowman makes the bold case that the phenomenon of martial arts is chiefly an invention of media representations. Rather than passively taking up a preexisting history of martial arts practices--some of which, of course, predated the martial arts boom in popular culture--media images and narratives actively constructed martial arts.
Grounded in a historical survey of the British media history of martial arts such as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, tai chi, and MMA across a range of media, this book thoroughly recasts our understanding of the history of martial arts. By interweaving theories of key thinkers on historiography, such as Foucault and Hobsbawm, and Said's ideas on Orientalism with analyses of both mainstream and marginal media texts, Bowman arrives at the surprising insight that media representations created martial arts rather than the other way around. In this way, he not only deepens our understanding of martial arts but also demonstrates the productive power of media discourses.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter 1: Introduction--The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture between Asia and America
- Chapter 2: Modernity, Media and Martial Arts, or: From Beginning at the Origin to the Origin of the Beginning
- Chapter 3: Martial Arts into Media Culture
- Chapter 4: Everybody Was Kung Ku Citing: Inventing Popular Martial Arts Aesthetics
- Chapter 5: From Linear History to Discursive Constellation
- Chapter 6: The Meaning of Martial Arts
- Chapter 7: I Want My TKD: Martial Arts in Music Videos
- Chapter 8: Martial Ads
- Chapter 9: The Invention of Tradition in Martial Arts
- Chapter 10: Inventing Martial Subjects: Toxic Masculinity, MMA and Media Representations
- Conclusion: After the Invention
- References
- Index
About the author
Paul Bowman is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of many works of film, media and cultural studies, on popular culture, postcolonialism, cultural theory, and martial arts. He is founder and director of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network.
Summary
Author Paul Bowman recasts our understanding of the history of martial arts, showing how Western media representations in the 1970s not only popularized the concept but actively created 'martial arts' as a recognizable idea and cultural phenomenon.
Additional text
The Invention of Martial Arts is a good read. Unlike many other scientific monographs, it is written in a manner accessible to non-specialists. It is recommended especially to martial arts researchers, sociologists of culture, and media experts.
