The cosmopolitical martial arts cinema of Asia and America: Gender, ethnicity and transnationalism (China)

This dissertation examines the Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts (or martial arts inspired) movies by major film talents/directors of Asia and North America, including Ang Lee, John Woo, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, Stephen Chow, and Andy and Larry Wachowski. It critically explores the politics of gender and ethnicity in transnational and comparative perspectives and analyzes the emerging cosmopolitical consciousnesses that move beyond the geopolitical divisions of Asia and America. Cosmopolitical consciousness is a transnational, interactive, and complex emergent identity that human agents realize and deploy strategically as they experience multiple dislocations through globalization, colonialism and histories of diaspora. Chapter One evaluates how Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts cinema generates its own transnational paradigm and outlines the history of martial arts and their incorporation into literature, theater and film. Chapter Two critically analyzes Ang Lee's wuxia (a.k.a. knight-errant or swordplay) film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and examines how the discourse of ethnicity is articulated through the politics of gender cross-culturally. Chapter Three investigates the seeming naturalness of masculinity in homosocial bonding and the ways John Woo has contested such constructions of masculinity and ethnicity in his Hong Kong and American films. Chapter Four traces the film trajectory of Jackie Chan transnationally and considers how Chan's cosmopolitical consciousness emerges from a history of colonialism, gender performance in Chinese theater, the geopolitics of race, masculinity and power, and experiences of making films in various cultural and political systems. Chapter Five examines Yuen Woo-pings choreography for the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix trilogy and then turns to Stephen Chow's Hong Kong produced film Shaolin Soccer for a comparison. This chapter demonstrates that The Matrix trilogy advances a Eurocentric version of posthumanism that perpetuates the humanist/posthumanist binary through digital cinema and the incorporation of martial arts, while Shaolin Soccer simultaneously engages new media technology and addresses the potential of cosmopolitical subjectivity and disembodied hegemonic discourses that underlie idealized bodies in martial arts cinema transnationally. The thesis critically examines cosmopolitical consciousnesses and knowledges that emerge as new critical paradigms for theorizing identities and political resistance both translocally and transnationally.