Description
Book SynopsisIn 1978 the films Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, both starring a young Jackie Chan changed the landscape of martial arts cinema. This first book-length analysis of kung fu comedy interrogates the politics of the films and their representations of the performing body.
Trade ReviewThis 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.
