Watching Hong Kong martial arts film under apartheid

Staden, Cobus van

doi:10.1080/13696815.2016.1236720

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, since independence, the traditionally East Asian martial arts—Karate, Taekwondo, Wushu (or Kung Fu)—have become part of African popular cultures, identities, and social practices, although they have received much less attention than the study of martial arts in “the West” (Hinton and D’Arcy 1994; Krug 2001; Green and Svinth 2003; Farrer and Whalen‐Bridge 2011). While China’s recent promotion of Wushu has attracted attention (Habimana and Stambach 2015), others have documented the earlier role of itinerant martial arts instructors (Chan 2011) and their afterlives (Jedlowski 2021), as well as Hong Kong martial arts films (Staden 2017), once screened at Dar es Salaam’s old movie theaters (Fair 2018) and today shared through imported DVDs.…”

Section: Moving Martial Arts From East Asia To East Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“Even if the Chinese Grow Wings and Fly”: Recasting Martial Arts in a Tanzanian Karate Dojo

Rafiq

Sheridan

2021

Anthropology and Humanism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In a Tanzanian seaside dojo, Sempai Ali Issa Hassan, a Swahili martial artist, filmmaker, and healer, offers an alternative history claiming the East Asian martial arts originate in the Afro-Islamic world. Starting from his reaction to a visit by a Chinese Shaolin master, we trace the contours of our experience making sense of claims which both challenge and recast assumptions about Afro-Asian cultural exchange.[martial arts, Africa-Asia connections, Swahili, Tanzania, spiritual knowledge] Master Wang's martial arts performance was spectacular. 1 The arena for his performance was Bagamoyo Film and Martial Arts (BAFIMA), a dojo in a fishing town near Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was our first time to witness such a performance. Before this, the Chinese martial arts we experienced were in movies. Everything we saw during this show was mesmerizing: Master Wang's aquamarine costume, a long silk shirt and pants; and the props he used, a sword with a dangling bundle of thread resembling a bird's tail and a thin spear with an elongated silver blade. The different Chinese fighting styles and their forms also captivated us. Wang's smooth delivery marked with graceful motions also impressed the students and contrasted with the energy-demanding Karate exercises that we normally practiced at BAFIMA (Fig. 1). As Yunus stood watching, he overheard his fellow students exclaim in excited Swahili: "Dah!" (Unbelievable!), "Aisee!" (I say!), "Kweli?" (Is it true?). Everyone's eyes fixated forward, soaking up Wang's every move. For two weeks after, students changed their exercises to imitate Wang: his low Shaolin style stance, kicks, and movement.Master Wang trained at China's famous Shaolin Temple and came to Tanzania in 2013 with the Confucius Institute to teach Wushu (Chinese martial arts). Alongside the recent growth of Chinese investment, trade, and migration

show abstract

Section: Moving Martial Arts From East Asia To East Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“Even if the Chinese Grow Wings and Fly”: Recasting Martial Arts in a Tanzanian Karate Dojo

Rafiq

Sheridan

2021

Anthropology and Humanism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the context of the Global South, “minor transnationalism” between China and Africa is manifested in a myriad of ways. Cobus van Staden’s (2017) research into South African audience’s consumption of Hong Kong martial arts film is a good example. Martial arts films, through legal or illegal channels of distribution, have connected South African audiences with Hong Kong and Chinese characters and audiences in their imagination of anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic struggles under Apartheid: Both the attractionist structure of these films and their “Chinese” (and therefore non-Western) setting aided audiences whose skills in resistant reading had been honed through years of westerns, to take maximal viewing pleasure from films which combined attractionist violence with explicitly antihegemonic narratives.…”

Section: Major and Minor Transnationalism In China–africa Screen Indumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Martial arts films, through legal or illegal channels of distribution, have connected South African audiences with Hong Kong and Chinese characters and audiences in their imagination of anti-colonial and anti-hegemonic struggles under Apartheid: Both the attractionist structure of these films and their “Chinese” (and therefore non-Western) setting aided audiences whose skills in resistant reading had been honed through years of westerns, to take maximal viewing pleasure from films which combined attractionist violence with explicitly antihegemonic narratives. (van Staden, 2017, p. 59)…”

Section: Major and Minor Transnationalism In China–africa Screen Indumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both the attractionist structure of these films and their “Chinese” (and therefore non-Western) setting aided audiences whose skills in resistant reading had been honed through years of westerns, to take maximal viewing pleasure from films which combined attractionist violence with explicitly antihegemonic narratives. (van Staden, 2017, p. 59)…”

Section: Major and Minor Transnationalism In China–africa Screen Indumentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The queer Global South: Transnational video activism between China and Africa

Bao

2020

Global Media and China

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, I examine grassroots cinematic connections between China and Africa by using Queer University, short for the Queer University Video Capacity Building Training Program, a 3-year (2017–2019) participatory video production program between Chinese and African queer filmmakers and activists, as a case study. Through interviews with Queer University organizers and participants, I discuss the transnational politics and decolonial potentials underpinning these grassroots initiatives. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s critical term “minor transnationalism,” I study transnational queer grassroots collaborations in the Global South, and, in doing so, unravel the hopes, promises, and precariousness of emerging people-to-people exchanges taking place in the Global South.

show abstract

“…The concept of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), coined in the field of new media studies, has proved useful in exploring these dimensions, as it points at how cultural products move across media and generate new formats, genres, and styles that are in turn shaped and transformed by the technological specificities of the medium that carries them (Jedlowski et al 2015). Combining the study of the social life of things and technologies (Appadurai 1986) with the conceptual tools of an "anthropology of texts, persons and publics" (Barber 2007), researchers looked at processes of remediation, cultural appropriation, and transformation that originated from the creative reception of international, pan-African and local media contents (Burns 2002;Gondola 2016;Krings 2015;Larkin 1997;Stern 2009;van Staden 2017). The analysis of how a Nigerian Pentecostal video film is appropriated and retold by a Tanzanian video jockey (Krings 2013), the film Titanic is reinterpreted in a Tanzanian comic book (Krings 2015), a local news item refashioned into a successful Kenyan hip-hop song (Omanga 2015), or an old Congolese song remediated into a mobile phone ringtone (Pype 2015b) allow the researcher to investigate the agency of the audience/producer and foregrounds the hermeneutic practices that constitute any engagement with media contents, as well as the cultural repertoires and aesthetic and narrative conventions mobilized as part of this process.…”

Section: Media and Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropological Approaches to Media in Africa

Jedlowski¹,

Pype²

2019

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Anthropologists began to study media relatively late in the history of the discipline. Research on media -in particular, mass media -tended to be associated "with the societies most anthropologists came from, and thus with the self rather than the other" (Krings 2015, p. 5), and except for a few rare exceptions, "it was not until the late 1980s that anthropologists began to turn systematic attention to media as a social practice" (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, p. 3, also Spitulnik 1993). This was true even for older media, such as songs, dance and theater, since those topics were associated with the other late research focus of urban anthropology. A similar situation can be observed in the context of African studies, where scholars began to concentrate consistently on the analysis of media only during the 1990s, in response not only to processes of "deterritorialization of culture" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) -the challenge to the reified boundaries that characterized functionalist approaches -and to the ongoing disciplinary shift toward an anthropology of "the present" (Fox 1991), but also as a reaction to changing conditions in the field. As Tilo Grätz underscores, during the 1990s "the proliferation of new media institutions such as independent newspapers, radio and TV stations … brought about a new media landscape in many African countries" (2011, p. 152) and researchers were compelled to account for the transformations that were taking place in front of their eyes.

show abstract

Watching Hong Kong martial arts film under apartheid

Cited by 13 publications

References 23 publications

“Even if the Chinese Grow Wings and Fly”: Recasting Martial Arts in a Tanzanian Karate Dojo

“Even if the Chinese Grow Wings and Fly”: Recasting Martial Arts in a Tanzanian Karate Dojo

The queer Global South: Transnational video activism between China and Africa

Anthropological Approaches to Media in Africa

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About