An equivocal space for the protestant ethnic: US popular culture and martial arts fantasia

Abstract

This article intends to undo the commodity status of several martial arts films produced in Hollywood and their pretence of ethnic recognition in terms of Rey Chow's concept of “the protestant ethnic”. In The protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism, Chow demonstrates how the present-day ethnos materialize themselves through protests. How have martial arts functioned as a noticeable apparatus for both this protest and capitalist interpellation? I will investigate a particular sociopolitical backdrop that conveniently approved martial arts as an ethno-cultural expression. The first half of the article is devoted to explicating the cultural work of Bruce Lee, a “protestant” in Chow's sense. He has constructed a space in which an Asian version of morality, authority, and supremacy can maintain an existence in a particular form intertwined with a sense of ethnic masculinity. The latter half interprets one of the later works that blatantly reshaped the significance of the martial arts film in accordance with a more obvious combination of commercial and security interests of the United States: the Karate Kid series produced through the 1980s. A close reading of the series shows how martial arts films necessarily require the concept of man, as embodied by the human commodity and ambiguous Asian manhood, as a strange but useful mimetic category of its definition of human beings.