Overview

"In 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan, caused a stir in the Hong Kong cinema industry and changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. Mixing virtuoso displays of acrobatic kung fu with knockabout humor to huge box office success, they broke the mold of the tragic and heroic martial arts film and sparked not only a wave of imitations, but also a much longer trend for kung fu comedies that continues to the present day. Legacies of the Drunken Master - the first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy - interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body. It draws on an interdisciplinary engagement with popular culture and an interrogation of the critical literature on Hong Kong and martial arts cinema to offer original readings of key films. These readings pursue the genre in terms of its carnival aesthetic, the utopias of the body it envisions, its highly stylized depictions of violence, its images of masculinity, and the registers of its ""hysterical"" laughter. The book's analyses are carried out amidst kung fu comedy's shifting historical contexts, including the aftermath of the 1960s radical youth movements, the rapidly globalizing colonial enclave of Hong Kong and the emerging consciousness of its 1997 handover to China, and the transnationalization of cinema audiences. It argues that through kung fu comedy's images of the body, the genre articulated in complex and often contradictory ways political realities relevant to late twentieth-century Hong Kong and the wider conditions of globalized capitalism. The kung fu comedy entwines us in a popular cultural history that stretches into the folk past and forward into utopian and dystopian possibilities. Theoretically rich and critical, Legacies of the Drunken Master aims to be at the forefront of scholarship on martial arts cinema. It also addresses readers with a broader interest in Hong Kong culture and politics during the 1970s and 1980s, postcolonialism in East Asia, and action and comedy films in a global context - as well as those fascinated with the performing body in the martial arts."

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9780824881573

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Reviews

This brilliant book is a breakthrough in several respects. For Hong Kong cinema and martial arts studies alike it offers the first intellectually serious book-length study in English of kung fu comedy. For cultural studies, author Luke White enlists a supple and sophisticated model that considers social and political contexts across a globally popular entertainment genre that does not easily lend itself to an allegorical reading of stories and themes. For the broad field of cultural theory, the book shows how it is possible to bring a European canon of thought to bear on cultural production in post-colonial contexts beyond the West without hollowing the latter out to demonstrate the interpretive power of the former.

This brilliant book is a breakthrough in several respects. For Hong Kong cinema and martial arts studies alike it offers the first intellectually serious book-length study in English of kung fu comedy. For cultural studies, author Luke White enlists a supple and sophisticated model that considers social and political contexts across a globally popular entertainment genre that does not easily lend itself to an allegorical reading of stories and themes. For the broad field of cultural theory, the book shows how it is possible to bring a European canon of thought to bear on cultural production in post-colonial contexts beyond the West without hollowing the latter out to demonstrate the interpretive power of the former.--Meaghan Morris, University of Sydney

Author Information

Luke White is senior lecturer in visual culture and fine art at Middlesex University, London. Allison Alexy is assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.

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