Action Hero Research Articles

Ambiguous Women

For five seasons, Yellowstone (2018) has been polarizing on many fronts and creating an ambiguous understanding of its political agenda and positioning. This article explores the depiction of female characters as one of these fronts. With a focus on Beth and Monica Dutton, the analysis seeks to point to the ways in which female characters are presented in ambiguous ways with regard to their gender performances and their correspondence to (racialised) stereotypes. As the characters evoke notions of potential empowerment for (Native American) women, it is crucial to examine them as sites in which gender and race are being contested. Beth and Monica Dutton mirror the ambiguous political nature of Yellowstone because while both characters appear progressive at times, they also reinforce antiquated notions about gender (and race). By conceptualising Beth as a female rendition of the action hero and Monica as a modern interpretation of the Celluloid Maiden trope, this paper addresses this ambiguity and debates in how far these representations can be considered progressive or empowering. While Beth appears empowering on the surface, her reversion into traditional gender roles and her internalised sexism inhibit such empowering effect. Moreover, because of her resemblance to the Celluloid Maiden trope, the lack of depth to her character, and her inauthentic casting, Monica does little to advance the fight for empowering representations of Native American women. Rooted in postcolonial feminist culture studies, this paper discusses what makes these characters ambiguous and whether or not they can be considered empowering at all.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: The Evolution of Masculinity in Geri-action and Its Implications for Male Hegemony

In 2023, a new adventure film called Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny premiered in theaters around the globe. In this film, Harrison Ford returns to his iconic role as Indiana Jones, showcasing a new perspective on action-packed adventures with seasoned heroes, which brings forth exciting new possibilities. Examining Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, this study delves into the development of masculinity in older action heroes, highlighting how these seasoned protagonists can challenge traditional notions of male hegemony. The study employs discourse analysis to examine the portrayal of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and draws comparisons to previous iterations and other characters within the genre. This analysis highlights the film's departure from conventional portrayals of masculinity, indicating a movement towards dismantling gender norms and challenging male hegemony. The analysis highlights the importance of older heroes in portraying changing perspectives on masculinity and male roles in today's society. This study presents a fresh outlook on gender studies, highlighting the importance of portraying masculinity in film in a more nuanced way. It advocates for breaking away from traditional norms and promoting diversity in storytelling and character development.

1990s dinomania: Public and popular cultures of palaeontology from Jurassic Park to Friends

In the 1990s, the English-speaking world was swept up in a deluge of popular cultural content on palaeontology. Dinosaurs were featured in programming ranging from B-movie horrors to children's cartoon franchises to popular novels. In some ways, this widespread public interest in palaeontology was mirroring broader public and scientific conflicts such as the Alverez hypothesis, the ‘birds are dinosaurs’ debate, ownership rights over dinosaur fossils, intelligent design and creationism in schools, and major DNA sequencing projects. But in other ways, this popular culture material existed beyond these specific debates, and speaks to the ways that depictions of palaeontology fostered public understanding of science in this period. Perhaps no two depictions of palaeontology frame different, and in some ways conflicting, aspects of the field better than two of the biggest popular culture phenomena of the 1990s: Jurassic Park and Friends. Jurassic Park, for which we are approaching the 30th anniversary of its initial release, spawned two sequels within a decade, and three more since then. The heroes of the original movie were two palaeontologists, Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Friends, which aired 1994-2004, was certainly the most successful sitcom of the period and one of the most popular television shows of all time. One of the six main characters, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), is a palaeontologist, who at the beginning of the series works for the American Museum of Natural History and by the show's conclusion, has received tenure at New York University. The depiction of palaeontology in these two programs could not be more different. Drs. Grant and Sattler are competent action heroes, whose expertise regarding dinosaur morphology and behaviour are central to both their survival and their identity. Notably, the filmmakers for Jurassic Park centred the science of palaeontology in its story, working close with palaeontologist Jack Horner. They were also helped by the fact that their source material, Michael Crichton's 1990 novel of the same name, closely engages with scientific ideas and ethics. For Ross Geller on the other hand, his career as a palaeontologist is only on the outskirts of the TV series. Viewers occasionally saw Ross in professional settings (the classroom, the museum, a conference, a fellowship interview), but are not provided with enough information to even determine what sort of research he even does. The focus is always on his personal life; his interest in dinosaurs is just one aspect of his personality, one that does not even get mentioned in many episodes. It thus offers an unusual representation of scientists and science as fully integrated into society and the lived experiences of non-scientists. The palaeoscience occurs off-screen as a facet of the character rather than their defining characteristic. In this article, the authors will situate Friends and Jurassic Park within the dinosaur-mania of the 1990s, while analysing the different versions of palaeontological study that they projected to the public. It will draw connections between how palaeontology was depicted on-screen to the major real-life debates and discoveries in the field at the same time.

Advertising Frames and the Legitimation of the Armed American Woman

The idea of the armed American woman – a woman in the United States who owns and uses a firearm – appears to have gained legitimacy in recent years. We investigate one aspect of this increased legitimacy by focusing on how she is depicted in gun advertising, which reflects and shapes legitimacy. Using a novel dataset of a sample of gun manufacturers’ advertisements in a publicly available gun magazine from 2001–2020, we conduct a content analysis to identify trends and differences between ads featuring men versus women. Next, focusing on ads in the sample featuring armed women, we identify phases of general framing strategies. Finally, analyzing all ads featuring armed women during the final phase, 2016–2020, which coincides with increased legitimacy, we identify specific frames of the armed American woman: the Serious Student, Capable Carrier, Domestic Defender, and Action Hero. Findings contribute to literature on gun advertising, discourses in American gun culture, and market legitimation.

Representation of American Women Spirit of 21st Century Through the Character of Agent Peggy Carter From Television Series Marvel Agent’s: Carter (ABC, 2015 - 2016)

This research is written to analyze the representation of Agent Peggy Carter in television series <em>Marvel Agent’s: Carter (ABC, 2015 – 2016). </em>Agent Peggy Carter is an agent turns into secretary who works in secret division of Strategic Scientific Reserve. Agent Peggy Carter tried to fight against sexism from her male counterparts in the workplace. The television series was planned to be produced into three seasons. However, due to the low rating in the second season, the production cancelled the plan to make the third season. The series highlight Agent Carter’s struggle against sexism. The research used female action hero theory to analyze about Agent Carter representation as female action hero and Semiotic film theory. The result shows that Agent Carter representing female action hero and how Agent Carter representing the spirit of American women in twenty first century.

Female Action Hero’s Superpower Representation: Audience Reception on Twitter in Disney’s Mulan (2020)

The live-action adaptation of the Movie Mulan produced by Walt Disney in 2020 sparked heated discussion from the audience after Disney tries to represent a strong female action hero by giving Mulan, the female protagonist, a superpower attribute called ‘chi’. In the era of new media, audience expressed their opinion through Twitter. Thus, the tweet responses and reviews on several websites were consecutively taken as primary and secondary data as it is an audience analysis research, applying feminist theory to examine the audience responses to the representation of female action heroes with a superpower. The research found that the majority of the audience, approximately 80%, falls into the opposition audience. They do not like the representation of Mulan with a superpower. On the other hand, less than 20% of audience fall into the dominant and negotiate audience. The high percentage of the oppositional audience indicates that the audience of the live-action Mulan would rather choose the representation of Mulan who came from a humble background instead of someone who was born great.

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in Okja, What Happened to Monday, and Geostorm

The Cruel Optimism of Anthropocene Technologies: Suspicion and Fascination of Technology in <i>Okja</i>, <i>What Happened to Monday</i>, and <i>Geostorm</i>

Muscles in the Movies: Perfecting the Art of Illusion

Muscles in the Movies: Perfecting the Art of Illusion

Old Stars in New Settings: The Critical Potential of Post-9/11 Action Comedy

After the ‘big switch’ of the hyper-masculine action heroes of the eighties toward the more sensitive masculinity of the nineties (Jeffords 1993), the new millennium saw a resurgence of films and t...

TOO OLD FOR THIS SH*T: Aged Action Heroes, Affect, and “the Economy of Exertion”

This article discusses how old age aligns with ideals of hegemonic masculinity and generic conventions of the action film through the performance of strenuous heroics. Whereas it is commonly assumed that action films omit many characteristics which reference the geriaction hero’s age in order to safeguard his masculine status, aspects of age and aging are in many contexts instead emphasized. The ailments and efforts that come with old age provide a potent source of melodramatic scenarios that set up the action hero as a morally right victim in pursuit of heroic restoration. Using the films The Last Stand, 3 Days to Kill, and Taken 3, an illustration is offered of how action films engage their heroes in an economy of exertive situations to draw power from this victimization and frame the violent actions of the characters as pleasurable.

Scholar Spotlight

Scholar Spotlight Samantha N. Sheppard and Jennifer McClearen Feminist media scholar Jennifer McClearen examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality in sports media. An assistant professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, she is currently completing her first book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC. McClearen's interest in the intersection of sports and media compelled her to help establish the newly formed Sports Media Scholarly Interest Group for SCMS. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jennifer McClearen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin (Marc Speir, 2020). Samantha N. Sheppard: What does it mean for you to study, write, and teach sports in this current cultural moment? Jennifer McClearen: It is a thrilling time to be a media scholar who examines the cultural politics of sports because of the ways sports media can spur national conversations about issues that impact our culture more broadly. Sports media is one gathering space where people of vastly different backgrounds, tastes, and interests come together. It is a space where live TV is still thriving, and time-shifting is far less [End Page 1] common than other forms of media. Sports media is a cultural space where democratic debate still circulates, so athlete activists have the capacity to become particularly meaningful agents of change. Sheppard: How has your research helped you address issues of visibility, representation, industrial practice, and social identity in women's sports? McClearen: My forthcoming book with the University of Illinois Press, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, is a cautionary tale about our scholarly and activist fascination with making female athletes more visible. I examine a specific sporting context in depth: mixed martial arts (MMA), or more specifically, the world's largest MMA promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Women have been and continue to be largely underrepresented or represented in trivialized ways within sports media. Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC has made women in combat sports more visible than ever before. Yet they do so by exploiting a vulnerable labor force of athletes and brokering unfulfilled promises of women's empowerment and the American Dream. The book urges those invested in women's sports to avoid a categorical assumption that visibility is good for all women in all contexts and instead asks us to consider who benefits and who is harmed when the image of the powerful female athlete becomes marketable in sports media brands. Sheppard: How did you come to your area of research? McClearen: If you had told me ten years ago that I would become an expert in sports media, I would have laughed. Yet hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty when considering my intellectual path here. I started graduate school planning to study the action genre with a specific focus on the representation of female action heroes, which is what my master's thesis focused on. I had been practicing martial arts for several years and always thought of mediated fighting in terms of cinema and television rather than as actual sports. Shortly after completing my master's degree, some Brazilian jujitsu training partners and friends convinced me to watch UFC fights. I skeptically began watching the sport that I had always considered violent, hypermasculine, and sexist. As I watched, I slowly began realizing that despite there being some truth to MMA's stereotype, the UFC was far more compelling than I had ever given it credit. When Ronda Rousey burst onto the scene as the first female UFC fighter, I thought, "This could be an interesting way to explore my interests in women, physical power, feminism, cultural politics, and the body." To my utter joy, I began reading literature in feminist and cultural studies of sports and realized those were the intellectual genealogies that allowed me to engage my most burning research questions. I read Cheryl L. Cole's "Resisting the Canon: Feminist Cultural Studies, Sport, and Technologies of the Body" and sensed that my budding academic research agenda suddenly became legitimate...

Masculinities and Aging in Ireland

There is a need for research to gain understanding of the social and cultural constructions of ageing masculinities that, as Gullette emphasises, operate together to construct a ‘culture of decline’. This presentation explores how cultural images of older men inform constructions of ageing and lived realities in Ireland. It draws on the Irish findings from a cross-national, inter-disciplinary project conducted in 2019 investigating older men’s perceptions of how they are represented in film and advertising. It applies innovative narrative and thematic analysis to data from four focus group discussions, interviews and reflective diaries, to explore participants’ (Irish men aged 65+) reactions to the portrayal of older men in TV and film. Stereotypes identified included older men as conservative, grumpy, sad, streetwise, trickster, or action hero. Thematic analysis identified themes including men’s identification with their jobs; their diminishing roles in the family; and old age as a matter of perception.

The Hero Myth in Popular Culture: The Hong Kong Action Hero in Shaolin Soccer and the Hollywood Kung Fu Champion in The Matrix

Cinema basically blends art and economics, and the film industry presents the hero figure in a fascinating image and action. The film visualizes a brave man or woman’s physical actions in the service to mankind. The action hero in his or her physical actions with rigor and passion to serve his or her nation and community exemplifies what a man or woman should be doing irrespective of personal interests. In the Wachowski brothers –directed The Matrix (1999), Neo Anderson, featuring Keanu Reeves, uses kung fu techniques and a rigorously trained body to save humans from the invasion of machines. Similarly, Steel Leg Sing in Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (2001), projecting Chow himself as an athletic champion, leads the Shaolin brothers team to a sweeping victory. The computer-generated graphic effects of the soccer hero’s exceptional performance in Shaolin Soccer and that of Neo’s virtual kung fu actions in The Matrix replicate a simulated body through electronically created computer graphics. Mighty Steel Leg Sing’s soccer game, enhanced by his acrobatics, embodies a perfect blend of the body, mind, and spirit. During a prestigious tournament, Sing sports soccer in such a spectacular feats that blends the athletic body and the twentieth-century popular sport. Like the digitized Neo in The Matrix, the soccer hero in Shaolin Soccer exposes magnificent feats of swirling movements and swift physical actions in the soccer field. The computer-generated graphics reposes the dynamics of the hero’s spiritual journey in the modern time human-computer interface brought to audiences through popular media and digital technology, shared by the Hong Kong and Hollywood action cinemas.

How the Black Guys Got to Kill All the White Guys and Still Be Good: An Essay on the Changing Dynamics of Race in American Action Cinema

There was a time, not so long ago, when a black man - a good black man - killing a white man in an action movie was tentatively accomplished. Not the killing itself, which was as bold and as marked by righteousness as the killing of bad whites by good whites. The tentativeness was, rather, both formal and narrative meaning that it was most evident in the careful unfolding of story and character within the limited universe of the film itself. Whites were changed a little, at first, becoming evil, faceless, and generic in new ways and blacks, the good blacks charged with dispatching these new bad white were, at least in the beginning, always flanked by more heroic heroes - white men - wilder men willing to kill and killing more effectively than their darker skinned counterparts. But that was only the beginning. What began as tentative within the narrative structure and characterization of action films has since exploded into a new pattern of race relations evident in, if not governing, a good many of the action films of the new millennium. Black men now are not only buddies paying second fiddle to the rampages of their white counterparts (Pfeil 1995); they are not only expendable characters sent off by whites, like a canary in a cage, to test the efficacy of unseen adversaries, nor are they merely scenery, filling up streets or starships - a silent fluid and chromatic backdrop against which the action takes place (Wallace 1995). Black men now are also, and often, heroes in their own right. They are cast as vengeful and lively characters, both likable and utterly fantastic, and they kill, as all action heroes must, with indiscretion. Who they kill is the topic of this essay, and not only who they kill, but how that killing has come to form the very ground - the necessary premise - of both their heroism and their goodness. Or to put it another way, we know them to be heroes not despite the fact that they kill white characters but because of it.

Rambo im Märchenland - Zur Darstellung von Hypermaskulinität in Disneys BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991) Zur Darstellung von Hypermaskulinität in Disneys BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991)

Since the 1970s new images of masculinity gained visibility in the media. The figure of the muscular action hero – in the style of a ›Rambo‹ or ›Terminator‹ – is a prime example for these emerging depictions of a new kind of masculinity. Yvonne Tasker explores the complexities and ambivalences of this Spectacular Bodies in her book of the same name (1993). Analyzing these cinematic bodies as well as the popular discourse concerning them, Tasker studies the social anxieties provoked by these images. Around the time of Tasker’s research, a new kind of Disney villain appeared: the muscular hypermasculine strongman who differs substantially from the tall, slender villains usually populating Disney films. This article places Beauty and the Beast’s (1991) Gaston, the first of this hypermasculine villains, in the context of the popular 1980s ›Rambo‹-discourse. As Rambo in fairy tale land, the parody of the parody, the image of Gaston plays with all the ambiguities and anxieties provoked by the extremely muscular male body. Gaston showcases narcissism, bodily excess and an instable articulation of masculinity consequently calling into question the idea of a fixed gender or sex. Celebrated and fetishized as well as feared and problematized, this representation of hypermasculinity is multiple in its pleasures and tensions.

Heroes and Representations of Masculinity in Thai Action Films

This paper contextualises a cultural construction of hegemonic masculinity and discusses ways in which Thai action film heroes in historical and Muay Thai films are represented. Traditionally, the quality of nakleng is desirable for Thai action heroes along with having mastery in a particular skill. In the moral realm, the idea of gratitude or khwam-katanyu in Thai, is prioritised and highly regarded to be the inevitable requisite for good men, which includes action heroes. This sense of gratitude extends to one’s ideological obligations to one’s motherland or matuphum, which is often thematically portrayed in Muay Thai and historical films through the struggle of the hero. Based on a reading of the two exemplar films, Ong Bak (Muay Thai Warrior 2003, dir. Prachya Pinkaew) and The Legend of King Naresuan: The Elephant Duel (2014, dir. Chatri Chalerm Yukol), the different social backgrounds of the two heroes, their hegemonic masculinity, autonomy and lack can be explained in relation to the discourse of Buddhist spirituality. In addition, the ways in which the two heroes are differently depicted is a cinematic device with the aid of which, in addition to the observance of filmic verisimilitude, the representations are designed to cater to segmented subject/citizen audiences. In psychoanalytic terms, each hero from the two films is similarly made to acquire autonomy and experience ‘lack’ in different realms of the symbolic order.

Marianne Kac-Vergne Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future

636 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) ecological emergency, and Idema does a great service in highlighting their work, summarizing it clearly and elegantly, and juxtaposing it with the sf texts that are his main concern. All in all, Stages of Transmutation is a valuable book, not only for its new readings of important sf texts, but also for the way that it restores the importance of scientific speculation in sf without privileging the reductionist dogmas of oldschool “hard sf.” My hope is that the concept of environmental posthumanism will gain wider currency, both in terms of theoretical understandings and as a way to approach other (and less-well-known sf texts). Idema can be faulted for saying almost nothing about how recent speculative fiction has so powerfully and innovatively dealt with issues of race, gender, and sexual minorities, alongside the financial logic of capital; but I strongly believe that a future, posthumanist science fiction worthy of the name needs to incorporate the biological and environmental concerns addressed here alongside these more obviously political concerns. One concluding note: this is no fault of the author, but I cannot forbear mentioning that the price of the volume is way too high for a book that is less than two hundred pages long and written in accessible prose.—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University Hegemonic Masculinity is Back. Marianne Kac-Vergne. Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. x+246 pp. $95 hc. Here in the early twenty-first century, studies of masculinities in sf action cinema are both necessary and pressing. Due to recent trends in Hollywood action cinema—the increasing number of male action heroes over 50 years old, the increase in female superheroes, and diverse casts that include people of color (and, if sf cinema continues to trend toward more representational content, LGBTQ+ characters)—the sf blockbuster may have entered a new era. But before we start parsing out the significance of these shifts in filmmaking, it will be helpful to reconsider the sf action heroes of the last 35 years or so. Marianne Kac-Vergne, an associate professor at the Université de Picardie in France, brings us up to speed on contemporary action stars in sf cinema. In Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, her focus is largely on the men and women who punch and kick and shoot their way through their stories (with a few exceptions). Kac-Vergne assembles films from Hollywood’s sf action cycle from the 1980s to 2014 and places them in conversation with one another to produce a readable and well-researched addition to the field of masculinities studies and cinema, as developed by scholars such as Yvonne Tasker in Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (1993). Moreover, KacVergne ’s interrogation of the sf action hero marks her study as an original contribution to an understudied area. Raewyn Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity” (see Gender & Society 19.6 [2005]: 829–859) more or less dominates the Cultural Studies approach to understanding masculinities, and Kac-Vergne follows this tradition. By doing so, she provides a clear foundation for her study: Hollywood’s sf blockbusters attempt to present the white hard-bodied male as the embodiment of a universal Man that 637 BOOKS IN REVIEW stands in for “humanity as a whole” (5). Beginning with this problem of hegemonic masculinity allows Kac-Vergne to assess a variety of topics in contemporary sf cinema: depictions of hypermasculinity in the 1980s and 1990s, the “sidelined” women, black masculinities (particularly Will Smith’s vehicles), and masculinity crises in the post-Clinton era. The author’s aim, however, is not to articulate the means by which Hollywood unabashedly creates characters who either do or do not neatly fit hegemonic masculinity, but “to deuniversalise white men and uncover the specific and changeable sets of norms embodied by male science fiction heroes” (5). According to the author, an attempt to literalize hegemonic masculinity in the form of a science-fiction action hero inevitably undermines itself by virtue of the untenable conception of monolithic masculinity. After a short introduction that outlines the scope and stakes of the book...

Paradoxes and Parapraxes: On (the Limits of) Cinematic Representation in Post-Conflict Situations

Paradoxes and ParapraxesOn (the Limits of) Cinematic Representation in Post-Conflict Situations Thomas Elsaesser Post-Conflict Situations, Media, and the Negative Agency of Victimhood As there is almost too much to say on the topic of "war and media," I hope I will be forgiven if I concentrate on one particular aspect of our topic, namely the media-memory of war and human suffering, as it manifests itself in "post-conflict" communities and cities. I shall focus in particular on some of the films that have emerged in the wake of the Bosnian civil war (1992–1995), which will afford an opportunity to reflect also more broadly on the relation of "cinema and memory." Here, the special affinity of cinema with the temporalities of recall, remembrance, and presence will be highlighted, as well as its obverse: cinema as the site of false memory and mis-remembering, of re-writing and over-writing. This, in turn, establishes the notion of "traumatic memory" as a helpful category, when considering the cinema as not only a reality-effect enfolded into a subject-effect, and thus as an "identity-machine" (to cite the basic tenets of "apparatus theory" from the 1970s). Since then, and under the influence of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, cinema has emerged as a time-machine, which is to say, as a unique way of joining perception with temporality and memory, charging time—reversible or irreversible, looped, linear or retro-active time—with affect and emotional texture. Deleuze's recourse to Henri Bergson has made us aware of the many ways that moving images carry with them memories and memory traces that are embodied and embedded: in places, in objects. But cinema is also the medium par excellence that can make pain and loss palpable, filling absence with an aching sense of presence, which is why moving images have helped give "trauma" a widely understood cultural meaning. Trauma, it seems, has become one of the states of mind and body, by [End Page 64] which we (negatively) assure ourselves of our identity and re-assure ourselves of our existence in time. Note how even Hollywood's superheroes—from Batman to James Bond—are now burdened with trauma, as if to name the core value of what humanizes their superhuman exploits and what remains vulnerable inside their technological accessories and armored carapace. If such action heroes are victims first, i.e., "reaction heroes," and therefore subject to forces that pull them back, or hold their forward trajectory hostage to retracing a pre-ordained course, then we may have a clue as to why trauma and victimhood have become such powerful attractors in our culture, almost suggesting that a post-traumatic situation is the generalized condition of living in the twenty-first century, which seems to have begun around 1990. How then to distinguish post-conflict situations from the generalized post-traumatic condition? First of all, there is, in the former case, the question of redress and reconciliation, which can be aligned—but should not be confused—with therapy and "working through." Secondly, there is the question of agency: to what extent are both traumatic conditions and post-conflict situations caused by a force external to the victim, or internally generated by the suffering subject? In a post-conflict situation, for instance, it is customary to make a preliminary and crucial but subsequently problematic and controversial distinction: that between victims and perpetrators. Crucial, because the very name and nature of a post-conflict situation suggests a trajectory whose aim it is to bring about an outcome that can apportion guilt and retribution, administer justice and effect reconciliation; controversial, because in a post-conflict situation, all parties involved feel themselves to be victims, each side enumerating grievances, injustices, and telling themselves narratives of victimization or persecution. Thus, the fact that "victim discourse" and the post-traumatic condition associated with it has become a generalized condition, notably in the wake of the different versions of the so-called "identity-wars," adds a complicating factor to our understanding of post-conflict situations and gives them also a special place within memory studies and trauma theory. Indeed, where groups of whatever size consider themselves minorities, stake...

Blending Myth and Modernity in the Global Chinese Cinema: The Hong Kong Action Hero in Zhang Yimou-Directed Hero

Zhang Yimou’s Hero presents an action hero, yet in a slightly different cinematic mode than that of Stephen Chow-directed Shaolin Soccer to blend myth and modernity. In Yimou’s martial arts cinema, Jet Li-starred Nameless hero uses martial arts to combat the king’s adversaries, including Donnie Yen-starred Long Sky, Maggie Cheung-starred Flying Snow and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai-starred Broken Sword in the service to the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 207 BC). The warrior hero’s indigenous body art helps the Qin Dynasty transform the smaller warring kingdoms into a powerful Chinese Empire, a strong foundation of modern China with economic and military superpower. Like their western counterparts, including T1000 and Neo, the Hong Kong action heroes, such as the warrior hero and the Qin King have been refashioned in the Hollywood controlled twentieth-century popular culture. Different from their Hollywood counterparts in actions, the Hong Kong action heroes in Hero primarily use their trained bodies and martial skills to promote the Chinese civilization, an adaptation of the Hollywood tradition of technologized machine body. Reworking of myth and archetype in Nameless’s service to the Qin Dynasty and the emperor’s mission to incept the Chinese Empire, the Hong Kong action heroes appear on screen, a blend of tradition and modernity. The film industry’s projection of the Chinese history with the legendary action heroes, including Nameless soldier and the Qin King globalizes the indigenous Chinese culture by using modern electronic digital technology, a resonance of the western technological advancement.

Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the contemporary afterlife of Satyajit Ray’s protagonist sleuth, Prodosh C. Mitter (Feluda) and the new media space he now inhabits. This paper sets off from the debate in this journal around Feluda’s cultural and socio-economic status, his origins, his intentions, his relation to labour, work and leisure, discourses emerging in the wake of Feluda’s fiftieth anniversary. I take the very event and its commemorative objects as the site to think through Feluda’s legacy. I work through Sandip Ray’s Double Feluda, the Feluda film released to mark the occasion, the new Feluda addatimes web series and the innumerable graphic novels, online text applications and audiobooks circulating in their wake. The contemporary I show also produces an undercurrent of nostalgia: a retro-fetish for older media forms in which Feluda is ensconced. The rest of the paper as it pans out takes mobility and migration as spectral but operative functions in Feluda’s universe. Feluda now inhabits a trans-medial universe and different urban regimes, both of which introduce intense affects of speed and travel – moving towards an action-hero status that is radically different from his earlier intellectual and rational demeanour. I thereby trace Feluda’s reinvention from a Nehruvian socialist imaginary into the corporatized action hero: his suave image connected now to a global neo-liberal aesthetic. This global, rootless cosmopolitanism triggers in its stead a constant search for identity, an exhumation of Feluda’s undead Bangal pasts.