Deconstructing Popular Culture

Bowman, Paul

doi:10.1007/978-0-230-22924-2

Cited by 20 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…This can be seen in 'JCB Song', the 2005 British pop hit by the band Nizlopi. If, as is well documented, US rap and hip-hop songs, aesthetics and culture often register 1970s martial arts in a very gritty and urban US inner-city manner (Brown, 1997;Kato, 2007;Marchetti, 2001), Nizlopi's 'JCB Song' evokes a very different memory of working-class childhood -perhaps particular to Britain (Bowman, 2008).…”

Section: Visual Dominancementioning

confidence: 98%

“…Specifically, in this song, the narrator sings in the first person, in character, as his 5-year-old former-self -performing the recollection of being in his father's JCB digger and reflecting on how happy he is to be with his dad and not at school where there are bullies and stern teachers. I have analysed this song at length elsewhere (Bowman, 2008(Bowman, , 2010 focusing on the ways it explores how images from film and popular culture colonise children's imaginations and organise their thinking and fantasy. The specific martial arts imagery included in the lyrics are nunchakus and Bruce Lee, and the video is an (award-winning) animation that reflects the way children draw pictures of themselves and their film and TV heroes.…”

Section: Visual Dominancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Game of text: Bruce Lee’s media legacies

Bowman

2019

Global Media and China

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This article situates Bruce Lee at the heart of the emergence of ‘martial arts’. It argues that the notion ‘martial arts’, as we now know it, is a discursive entity that emerged in the wake of media texts, and that the influence of Bruce Lee films of the early 1970s was both seminal and structuring of ‘martial arts’, in ways that continue to be felt. Using the media theory proposition that a limited range of ‘key visuals’ structure the aesthetic terrain of the discursive entity ‘martial arts’, the article assesses the place, role and status of images of Bruce Lee as they work intertextually across a wide range of media texts. In so doing, the article demonstrates the enduring media legacy of Bruce Lee – one that has always overflowed the media realm and influenced the lived, embodied lifestyles of innumerable people the world over, who have seen Bruce Lee and other martial arts texts and gone on to study Chinese and Asian martial arts because of them.

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Section: Visual Dominancementioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Visual Dominancementioning

confidence: 99%

Game of text: Bruce Lee’s media legacies

Bowman

2019

Global Media and China

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“…By this what is meant is that the implication is that styles or institutions are 'repressive', that they 'repress' something that therefore needs to be freed or emancipated (nature). In Bruce Lee this argument has a clear countercultural resonance (Bowman 2008(Bowman , 2010. But even when it is disconnected from any kind of countercultural discourse, we can perceive the presence and effects of a 'repressive hypothesis' in the attitudes of many modern non-traditional and antitraditional approaches to martial arts.…”

Section: Wwwcfacuk/jomecjournal @Jomecjournalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 I have deconstructed the widespread obsession with 'the street' before, with specific reference to 'politicized academia'. There I referred to it as 'street fetishism' (Bowman 2008). Many similar obsessions circulate in martial arts discourses.…”

Section: Introduction: the Reality Drivementioning

confidence: 99%

Instituting Reality in Martial Arts Practice

Bowman

2014

JOMEC Journal

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This article explores the relations between the desire for reality in martial arts training and the inevitable emergence of institutional styles. It argues that since at least the time of Bruce Lee's influential 1971 article 'Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate', there has been a growing effort in Western martial arts circles to escape from the constraints and strictures of 'artificial styles' and to achieve a kind of emancipation that would reflect a direct engagement with the 'truth' and 'reality' of combat. As problematic as such notions are, they nevertheless feature prominently in martial arts discourses. Accordingly, this article identifies and engages with some of the key structuring terms and enduring problematics of contemporary martial arts discourses in the West. It does so chiefly via a consideration of Keysi Fighting Method (KFM) -a (post)modern 'reality martial art' that is in many respects a modern iteration the anti-institutional impulse of Bruce Lee, and also an exemplary case of a wider contemporary 'reality martial arts' movement. This 'movement' stretches from mixed martial arts (MMA) at the sporting end of the spectrum to military martial arts like krav maga. The article considers, first, KFM's spectacular emergence around 2005, thanks to the DVD-extras of the film Batman Begins, second, its mediatized proliferation, and, third, issues connected to its demise and reconfiguration in 2012. It asks what we might learn from the spectacular example of KFM about the relations between mediascape, embodiment, reality martial arts and 'institution'. The paper argues that there is an inextricable and inevitable entanglement of, first, the eternally returning desire for 'reality' in martial arts and, second, an attendant invention of institution and style. It connects the formation of institutions to the necessity of pedagogy and discipline, and in doing so proposes a way to approach martial arts that recasts the relations between modern 'realist' martial arts and 'traditional' or supposedly 'unrealistic' martial arts like taijiquan. The purpose of this endeavour is to propose a set of terms and concepts that might prove useful in developing the discourse of martial arts studies beyond existing disciplinary vocabularies, concepts and problematics and into a reconfigured ontological and epistemological terrain. Contributor NotePaul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is author and editor of many books, journals, chapters and articles on diverse aspects of film, culture and politics. Among his works on martial arts are Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010) and Beyond Bruce Lee (2014). His next book will be Martial Arts Studies (forthcoming in 2015). He has varying degrees of experience of a wide range of martial arts, occasionally teaches taijiquan and kung fu, and is currently learning escrima.

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“…There is much to be said about this argument [Bowman 2007;Bowman 2008]. I return to it here not just as a rejoinder to Wetzler's advocation of an irreducibly metaphorical use of 'system' (even though he seems to present 'system' as if it is not metaphor but reality), but also because I believe it is vital (and vitalising) to try, as Laclau urges us, 'to understand the logics of [the] constitution and dissolution [of entities and identities], as well as the formal [or informal] determinations of the spaces in which they interrelate'.…”

Section: Defining Problems: Relationality Before Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%