3. “I’m Michael Jackson, You Tito”: Kung-Fu Fighters and Hip-Hop Buddies in Martial Arts Buddy Films

In the cultural sphere of popular sports, the athletic bodies of Asian and black masculinity were scanned and commoditized, as colonial bodies had been before, for the expansion of global multiculturalism, at the same time that oppositional racialization from the discourse of genes became blurred. In this chapter, I turn to another dominant sphere of race, masculinity, and manhood—Hollywood studio productions—and concentrate on how urban culture becomes pop culture in national culture. In the post–civil rights era, urban culture, namely hip-hop, emerges from neoliberal abandonment and youth alienation, whereas the martial arts action genre evolved from Hong Kong film studios and anti-imperialist dramas. In this way, this chapter theorizes the transpacific cultural fusions between Asian martial artists and black hip-hop buddies, an Afro-Asian pairing that sutures the lead heroes to multiethnic audiences and creates an “oppositional gaze,” a direct disavowal of racial magnetism. This chapter theorizes the relationship between Asian-black spectatorship and screen image, cinematic representation and social movement politics, and the function of racialized suture and the visual reception of martial arts buddy films.

On May 16, 1973, the martial arts films Fists of Fury, Deep Thrust: The Hand of Death, and Five Fingers of Death were ranked one, two, and three, respectively, in gross box office receipts.¹Close This was the first time in U.S. popular cinema that foreign films dominated box office receipts and garnered mass audience appeal. Although discriminatory production codes existed in Hollywood, Saturday matinees and drive-in theaters across the country capitalized on kung-fu fever; blaxploitation and martial arts films were advertised together on theater billboards and played back-to-back. Such commercial and aesthetic articulations had been nonexistent in U.S. visual culture, especially representations of racialized men captivating the moviegoing imaginations of multiethnic audiences with a newly cultivated social movement consciousness. In the wake of the Black Power social movement, blaxploitation films such as Black Belt Jones, Cleopatra Jones, and Super Fly incorporated martial arts, showcasing the physical and mental powers of Afro-wearing superheroes who achieved racial equality or even social revolution. Cinematic representations impacted urban reception when famous black martial artists such as Moses Powell, Sōke Little John Davis, and Sabumnim David Herbert were inspired to train in several disciplines, eventually becoming masters of jiujitsu, kumite karate, tae kwon do, and hapkido.

In the martial arts cinema genre, the Rush Hour series and Romeo Must Die have wide appeal among minority communities and young audiences because they champion the underdog. First produced and marketed from its anti-colonialist heritage in Hong Kong, martial arts films still pack a punch today because of the figure of the lone hero, who in most stories has an ethical motive for his violent escapades. Yet, the genre also requires the hero to punish other racialized men, who in the filmic narrative must be represented as the real threat, committing violence and off-limits transgressions in front of the camera. Subsequently, the sinister work of white supremacy is then depicted as an apparition in the filmic narrative, spectral, mostly invisible, and forgotten. In the early days of kung-fu fever, the martial arts genre made its initial entry into U.S. markets through blaxploitation films and the cult icon Bruce Lee.²Close Despite orientalist fears and fantasies over caricatures including the wildly popular Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, the charisma and physicality of Lee in kung-fu choreography immortalized him as a global star and sparked the commercial viability of the martial arts action flick. The genre that Lee catapulted into mainstream currency has recently been adapted to the standard buddy film format prevalent in Hollywood Westerns and 1980s action films. Martial arts buddy films have emerged as an important medium expressing cross-racial solidarity for possible subversive politics by crossing the prescriptions of racial magnetism. The coupling of a streetwise African American buddy with hip-hop credentials with an ethical martial arts hero with humble bravado has served notice to mainstream audiences and cultural critics alike that this genre, using the critical lens of race and masculinity, can also be a vehicle for wide-ranging antiracist and anti-imperialist critiques. Subsequently, in present-day mainstream Hollywood and independent cinema, the popularity of Chinese and Hong Kong directors, actors, productions, and aesthetics has brought to light traditions that are reshaping the cultural politics of race and masculinity in U.S. visual culture. Indeed, Jamaican recording artist Carl Douglas sang in 1974 that “everybody was kungfu fighting,” and this fascination with martial arts refracts not only through the global popularity of hip-hop consumerism and aesthetics but also, historically, through the relationship between visual culture, social movements, and alternative spectatorship.

Not surprisingly, the martial arts genre still packs a multi-million-dollar punch today because it mixes the cultural juggernaut of urban hip-hop with the physical spectacle of martial arts. Released in 2000, Romeo Must Die was distributed by Warner Brothers and grossed over $55 million in the U.S. market. Historically, Warner Brothers has been the premier studio and distributor of martial arts action films, with such noteworthy productions as Enter the Dragon. More than twice the latter’s production costs, Romeo Must Die created a cottage industry of Jet Li movies that mixed his wushu talents with supporting casts of black “whipping boys.” Previously, in 1998, Rush Hour had redefined the action and comedy genres with box office sales of over $140 million in U.S. gross receipts and over $240 million in total worldwide gross. In 2001, Rush Hour 2 grossed $347 million, making it the most profitable installment in the series, and in 2007 Rush Hour 3 amassed $257 million worldwide. Rush Hour’s distributor, New Line Cinema, created a franchise that would position Jackie Chan as the first Asian action hero in the lucrative Hollywood action/adventure film industry.

Call it then a merger where East meets Black, or, as W. E. B. Du Bois writes, “men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled.” In present-day society, we see in popular film, music, and literature numerous cultural representations depicting Asian and black masculinity together. Insofar as culture mediates the process within which the individual in the private sphere becomes a citizen in the public sphere, films incorporating the buddy pair and martial arts genre such as the Rush Hour films and Romeo Must Die, musicians melding hip-hop and kung-fu iconography such as the Wu-Tang Clan and Fu-Schnickens, and television shows such as Martial Law and Lost have coalesced into the national culture by entering mainstream popular consumption and aesthetic appreciation.³Close The past invisibility of Asian film culture in the United States has now been replaced by a blossoming industry due to the fertile influence of a “Yellow Pacific,” a phrasal play around Paul Gilroy’s famous notion of the “Black Atlantic.”⁴Close Never before has the international traffic of bodies, in this case “alien” imports, and the movement of free-flowing Pacific Rim capital produced such a dynamic proliferation in daily leisure practices and representations. In addition, professional sports has reinforced this diasporic fusion of hip-hop culture and kung-fu symbology, especially in basketball, where stars such as Allen Iverson regularly sport tattoos with Chinese calligraphy. Moreover, the Japanese phenom affectionately called Ichiro received the Most Valuable Player award in our national pastime, baseball, which has historically acted as a careful measure of the color bar in national politics. Indeed, something curious is in the air. By redefining Asian American masculinity, race, and citizenship, these social transformations have reconfigured and recoded the relations of force—the movement of cultural transformations in social and political terms.

Theorizations of the body, the woman of color, the invert, the octoroon, the transgender subject, to name a few, have forcefully critiqued dualistic thinking and exposed its fallacy, thereby allowing for human agency through the disidentification of normative common sense.⁵Close This chapter follows through with this important work and places it within that tradition. Yet also, this chapter reorients the discussion toward an evaluation of how martial arts buddy films as a critical space in culture mediate state formations and citizenship within transnational circuits and flows. Whereas previous invocations of the kung-fu fighter had borrowed the mythic figure in order to proclaim an Asian America cultural nationalism predicated on a patriarchal and heterosexual identity, this chapter directs our attention toward what Antonio Gramsci calls the point of condensation, a collapsed moment in history from which the knot of a particular time and place emerges from cultural expressions and political conditions.⁶Close This chapter theorizes this convergence in film analysis, in which state imperatives of rivalrous opposition and multiethnic citizenship claims merge and in which transnationalism and masculinity intersect. These Asian-black cultural formations derived from global movements have created a new structure in relation to masculinity and race in our increasingly interconnected world. Asian American masculinity is undergoing a transitory period in which it cannot be conceptualized without investigating its relation to other masculinities as well as global culture industries. Hong Kong martial arts productions and black urban culture are the narrative modalities in which these cultural formations have evolved in the wake of transformations in state-sponsored market democracy and the restructuring of neoliberal capitalism.

After the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this relationship between historical context and these emergent cultural expressions can be understood in terms of the transition from the Cold War era of ethnic liberalism to the post–civil rights era of multicultural market democracy. The former is based on “melting pot” assimilation and domestic containment of certain perceived menaces including blacks, homosexuals, and communists whereas the latter is predicated on pluralism and difference.⁷Close In promoting the ideals of assimilation to the American creed either in ethnic or multicultural paradigms, citizen formation has been a process of racial formation through the supposed shedding of old skin: those cultural, linguistic, and racial markers that cannot be assimilated into the liberal paradigm without violence and exploitation.⁸Close The various radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had called into question the contradictions found in market democracy, with its incessant crises of racism, homophobia, and patriarchy. The processes that are involved in market democracy and its expansion include its attendant ideology of possessive individualism and the market economy.⁹Close Market democracy as an entrenched political ideology works in tandem with global capitalism, which has undergone a sea change in its capacity to expand to greater markets in both absolute and relative terms. The contradictions upholding market democracy differentiate between public and private life, civil society and the state, and the “natural rights of man” and the market economy.¹⁰Close

In exchange for security of self and property, individuals enter into a social contract with the nation-state in order to establish rules regarding sociality and economic life in civil society.¹¹Close The nation-state is best described through its role in constructing categories of variegated citizenship. In Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” the ruse of power of the bourgeois institution of the modern state, in promoting the doctrine of the “rights of man” into a category of universal abstract citizenship, has masked the division of labor and assumptions of private property within capitalist modes of production in civil society. This mechanism of repression in civil life, which occludes real human emancipation or what Marx terms “species-being” (the manifold human capacities for mental and physical life-sustaining energies), is artificially transcended in bourgeois terms as “political emancipation” through abstract citizenship granted by the state. In specific historical terms, the regulatory function of the state in constructing modern subjectivity is necessarily grounded upon both its form and its mutual dependence with civil society, where the two work inseparably reproducing social-economic divisions of labor, exchange value, commodity fetishism, and the extraction of surplus value from wage labor.¹²Close From the representational visibility of racialized men in national culture, does this relative acceptance mean that liberal society is gradually progressing toward a racial promised land, or do the plenitude of representations occlude the growing disparity in material wealth and access to resources in the post–civil rights era? In order for narrative modes of market democracy to succeed, its promises of equal opportunities and inclusion in the political and economic process must seem to be fulfilled in order for its legitimacy to be secured.

The growing cultural acceptance and profitability of Asian-black representations, spurred on by transformations in market democracy and capital, are a relational matter involving a continual process of formation and superseding “unstable equilibria,” a condition in which the relations of forces are favorable or unfavorable on the terrain of struggle.¹³Close Cultural expressions are immediately connected to political representation and ideology, a complex formation in an arena of different social contestations and social formations. In Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci reminds us that in particular historical periodization, after the settlement of hegemonic blocs, crisis marks the beginning of their disintegration. His notion of crisis encapsulates the indeterminacy between the “popular” and the “economic” in which national culture, in constructing categories of citizenship, produces the consent-upholding hegemony as well as the locales for resistant cultural expressions.¹⁴Close The chronology of crisis, how it operates in the linear framework of time, is not explicit in Gramsci’s work, but one surmises that crises may operate in two forms: one as rupture and the second as process. Therefore, in describing cultural expressions in signifiers of time and aesthetic content and the compounding effect of various social and cultural formations in a particular era, his idea of crisis can be applied to both historical and filmic analysis in which we see emergent articulations between Asian and black masculinity.

In order to see the importance of these Afro-Asian cultural expressions and how they are linked to the processes of racial formation in the United States, let us turn to how the history of Asian American masculinity is intricately tied to the racial formation of African American men. Much of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois is conceptualized in terms of citizenship rights equating to “this longing to attain self-conscious manhood.”¹⁵Close If we understand the relational aspects of U.S. racial formation and claims of citizenship, then the intersecting histories of African American and Asian American masculinities tell the story of American dreams deferred and the promises of market democracy unfulfilled. Initially, during the process of rapid industrialization and Taylorist capitalism in the mid-to late nineteenth century, African American slaves and Chinese coolie workers were used as cheap, exploitable labor. Each racial group was pitted against the other in order to reduce wage levels through the “divide and conquer” rationalization of industrial capitalism. The expansion of the western frontier scripted from the doctrine of Manifest Destiny invoked the collective mythology of the United States as a white settler nation that needed to fulfill its imperialist development into a “shining city on the hill.” Racialized men functioned to build the nation—the roads, railways, textiles, manufactured wares, agrarian economy—while simultaneously being excluded from political modes of representation in favor of white working-class rights called Free Labor Ideology.¹⁶Close In fact, the rise of industrial capitalism gave rise to modern forms of racism including raciology, eugenics, and sexology, which made “common sense” by delineating a stratified citizenship based on superficial skin differences. What eventually manifested in the euphoria of rationalism and science became the steely racial discourses that legitimated the domination of one group of men over another by invoking a superior culture and biological makeup.

The politics of skin emerged in the early part of the twentieth century as an entrenched ideology that consolidated white identity as an unmarked category of social privilege and economic advantage in colonial and imperial centers and peripheries. A prevailing hysteria among these so-called elites at this time called for the preservation and purity of the white races from degeneration by miscegenation between “superior” and “inferior” cultures of the world. Culture then became the dividing line, stratified by racial and economic hierarchy. Black and Asian people suffered daily humiliations from the racist discourses, along with violent retribution for transgressing social taboos even while living segregated in the social geography of urban slums, ethnic ghettoes, and shantytowns. Beneath this societal weight, racialized men consistently endured indignities through state policies and legal institutions. Specifically in the United States, the Supreme Court decisions Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Ozawa v. United States (1922), and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) all establish a legal record in not-so-uncertain terms that citizenship claims were based upon race. Jim Crow segregation; immigration exclusion in 1882, 1917, 1924, and 1934; and the alien land laws in 1913, 1920, and 1923 bespeak a systematic pattern to disenfranchise racialized men from property ownership and political involvement.¹⁷Close Indeed, the politics of skin has scarred the body politic in the United States with deep wounds that have yet to heal because the processes of market democracy have concealed the material exploitations and expropriations still taking place today in civil society.

By reading the martial arts hero as the subject who disrupts state-sanctioned property relations in Romeo Must Die and modes of cultural imperialism in Rush Hour, both the telos of U.S. exceptionalism, his deployment as a point of enunciation in national culture is a catalyst for social formations with potential cross-racial alliances.¹⁸Close The martial arts hero, as the bodily site of contradictions and open-ended negotiation in the dialectic between assimilation (the model minority) and racial difference (the Yellow Peril), identifies and characterizes a significant shift in U.S. cultural, racial, and sexual politics. This transition actively reflects Gramsci’s notion of crisis. Constructed, educated, and disciplined by state power, the martial arts citizen-subject in aesthetic composition and content-oriented narratives in recent martial arts films has been conceived in a developmental narrative, inevitably for a symbolic ordering of the nation-state. The hyphenated term ties together the people and the state, which in turn represents the collective consciousness and will of private individuals, who are abstracted into stereotypes sustaining the racial state. Film culture documents the manner in which state narratives, including the logic of racial magnetism, get inscribed into the cinematic apparatus, but it also disrupts and defamiliarizes the coherency and consistency of the “equilibria” that sustain barriers to political embodiment and realized citizenship.

In The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman insightfully explains that suture is the process by which cinematic texts bestow subjectivity upon the viewer.¹⁹Close The operation of suture covers up the camerawork through the process of identification with the object. Concealing the regulation of what I term “cinematic citizenship,” modalities of power are evinced through the “constructedness” by which we think of ourselves as unique. Cinematic citizenship designates the identifications made with screen images by both racialized and white spectators based upon suture in terms of who has subjectivity and who does not as well as how the cinematic apparatus enjoins subversive identifications with the racialized buddies against dominant state narratives. Thus, I want to borrow from bell hooks’s idea of a critical spectatorship in which experiencing visual pleasure is also an oppositional gaze about contestation and confrontation, “to see if images were seen as complicit with dominant cinematic practices.”²⁰Close Film construction, then, can be an allegory of the mechanisms of market democracy and its incessant project to individualize communal sociality, to reduce structural considerations of power to unlinked individuals, and to mask whiteness as a noncategory that accrues actual and symbolic capital. However, state legitimation and hegemonic reproduction are in constant negotiation with the countervailing influences of marginal forces, and counterhegemony is a tactic that can be used in emancipatory politics. In this sense, the martial arts buddy genre reveals through cinematic citizenship the fissures and gaps in market assumptions of property relations, possessive individualism, and racial distinctions based on the politics of skin. In this configuration, the mapping of suture in martial arts buddy films creates interracial identifications. When racial difference is interrogated and deconstructed, racialized spectatorship interprets visually the markers of race and racialization by seeing their subjectivity within racialized images and in a manner that addresses scenes of interracial conflict, coalitions, and romance.

In this way, cinematic citizenship addresses what Manthia Diawara calls “resisting spectatorship.” Concerning the intersection of race and spectatorship, he says: “Every narration places the spectator in a position of agency; and race, class, and sexual relations influence the way in which this subjecthood is filled by the spectator.”²¹Close Returning to bell hooks, she reminds us that “within the Southern, Black, working-class home of my growing up, in a racially segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship.”²²Close Further, Stuart Hall describes critical practices that maintain that identity is “constituted ‘not outside but within representation.’”²³Close This chapter seeks to address the types of critical identities constituted in Asian-black representations in martial arts buddy films. Insofar as film culture produces sets of ideas and representations based on race and masculinity, I ask these questions: Do racialized men have subjectivity and agency within an Asian-black spectatorship? Is the audience allowed to have identification with them through the cinematic apparatus and with critical, oppositional gazes?

Reviews of Rush Hour and Romeo Must Die reflected the history of critical dismissal and racialized reception of the martial arts genre. For Rush Hour, the critical responses were mixed yet similar in theme, often referring to language, race, and nation. Most reviews coded comparative racialization using the language of interracial oddity, including such text clips as “mismatched duo,” “wacky double-team scenario,” and “truly opposites.”²⁴Close Specifically, many reviews focused on Chris Tucker’s penchant for words and Chan’s poor English. Newspaper reviews such as in the New York Times quipped, “Mr. Chan’s own struggle with the language barrier has made him not only the current author least likely to have written his own English autobiography (‘I am Jackie Chan’) but also a silent partner in the film.”²⁵Close The San Francisco Examiner was noticeably less racist in its construction of Chinese accents, yet its reviewer still remarked about Asian and black language stereotypes: “A lot of good fun is made of the contrast between Chinese and Black stereotypes, and between Tucker’s motor mouth … and Chan’s reticence.”²⁶Close Thus, initial critical reviews dialogically racialized Tucker and Chan, establishing the markers of race and nation through the performance of the English language, and subsequently set the early parameters of spectator expectations and genre pleasure.

For Romeo Must Die, the overall sentiment of movie critics was unanimous in that race and sexuality were the primary categories of commentary. Most reviewers lambasted the method acting of Jet Li and focused their complaints on his supposed lack of screen charisma and sexuality. TV Guide lamented the “utter lack of chemistry between Li and Aaliyah.”²⁷Close Other critics reinforced Hollywood production codes by calling into question Li’s sexuality and genre expectations of Asian masculinity: “Let’s face it, no one’s coming to a Jet Li movie for sex.”²⁸Close Yet another progressive review periodical commented on Hollywood production codes that denied Asian and black audiences’ desire for interracial romance. An Asian American male movie critic, Dennis Lim of the Village Voice, remarked: “Race is the movie’s gimmick. … Meanwhile, the romantic angle promised by the title is barely acknowledged. Some Romeo—by the final scene, Han and Trish have barely worked their way up to holding hands.”²⁹Close Such discrepancies among various film critics suggest the comparatively racialized dynamic to spectatorship and critical reception. In this way, the expectations of reviewers were mediated through categories of sexuality, language, nation, and race encoded in the discourse of racial magnetism.

In many 1980s action films such as the Rambo films, The Terminator, and the Die Hard series, the white action hero is damaged grotesquely in some physical and psychological manner.³⁰Close Likewise, the martial arts hero keeps on his journey for ethical revenge as well as reconciliation through bodily agency. In the process, he highlights the tension between individualism and communitarian principles, albeit in a postcolonial and transpacific context. Whereas the Greek tragic hero is central to locations of power, typically being an aristocratic or royal persona, the martial arts hero is a personage on the margins, delegitimated from power and mainstream society in some way, gliding through the rigid boundaries of society, a hero situated on the borders.³¹Close Before we turn to a history of the martial arts hero, some comments explaining major characteristics of the ethical/border identity of the martial arts hero would seem necessary.

As an activist for the community, the martial arts hero has much in common with the border ballad hero. In With His Pistol in His Hand by Américo Paredes, we learn about the border ballad hero in the “Corrido of Gregorio Cortez.” The border hero confronts the dominant folklore of the Texas Rangers and the mythology of a homogeneous national identity. Ever the ethical and common man, the border hero must wear many hats, performing as a superhero, an everyday laborer, a warrior, and a trickster. The ballad in its many variants has a leitmotif that is useful in pointing out the tensions between the individual and the community:

Like the martial arts hero, he must fight against antimiscegenation taboos and corrupt state officials. Moreover, he fights against multiple interpellations from the church, law, family, and media, but his armor is limited and he carries a lone pistol in his hand. Trying to resist such forces, the border hero does not act impulsively, but when he moves, he moves decisively and courageously, defending his rights in a border region that was once part of Mexico but was artificially Anglicized following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Following this inquiry, the martial arts hero is racially marked as outside, an inauthentic subject who is in opposition to the mythology of imperial masculinities. Both heroes challenge the collective myth of origin in how the nation imagines itself.³³Close The borders of the nation-state have been the liminal space for signification, especially in terms of how the citizenry is modulated by state apparatuses and cultural mythologies. As Roberto Alejandro reminds us:

Citizenship, in short, belongs to the realm of the symbolic; that is, a space of symbols that previous generations constructed as well as a domain which is always in a process of reconstitution, and whose meaning the state seeks to define. The citizen, by contrast, is not a member of the symbolic. He inhabits everyday life, which is full of symbols, but which cannot be reduced to a sphere of symbols.³⁴Close

A move for a symbolic collective memory, the corrido’s intervention reinscribes a history that the racial state has erased. Underlining the role of folklore, the corrido repositions the man on the border in the national mythology. Similarly, the martial arts hero has an ethical category for identification, a border identity that shows the power of individual action without community resources, and the centrality of the body as the means for social transformation.

The physicality and fight choreography of the martial arts genre has its genesis in Peking opera, an aesthetic art form dating to the Song Dynasty (960–1280).³⁵Close Through rigorous bodily gymnastics and craft apprenticeship, Peking opera forged actors, performers, and singers who could master several disciplines in theatricality. Elaborate face painting, costumes, and modest staging set the environment where “stylized celluloid fighting scenes” were the precursor to modern rapid-fire kung-fu scenes.³⁶Close The stories derived from folklore, historical events, popular novels, and mythology. Stars such as Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung trained from an early age to take the mantle as future performers, whether on the stage or the silver screen.

From these grand origins, the modern martial arts hero came filmically embodied as a lone figure from Chinese history. His history is not unlike that of Gregorio Cortez. Wong Fei-hung, born in Guangdong province during the late Qing Dynasty, was a defender of the weak as well as a proponent of justice.³⁷Close A Chinese nationalist and champion of Confucian values, Wong was also an herbal doctor and martial arts instructor specializing in the tiger-crane style with a fighting technique known as the nine special fists.³⁸Close Much like the power of the corrido, his mythology spread like cultural wildfire, eventually inspiring a series of ninety-nine black-and-white films during 1949–1970 that were based on his life, with various actors playing the role of Wong.³⁹Close

Action films such as Drunken Master and Once Upon a Time in China, which coincidentally launched the careers of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, respectively, dramatize the mythology of Wong Fei-hung in modern Hong Kong cinema. Before his arrival in Hollywood, the fictionalized Hong Kong action hero revived many of the real-life Wong’s attributed qualities including a proud Chinese cultural identity and humanistic ideals such as defending the weak, promoting justice, and redressing past wrongs. In Hong Kong, perceptions of Westernization and modernization are ambivalent at best. In a Wong-inspired movie starring Jet Li, the martial arts hero wants to preserve those traditions that galvanize a sense of Chineseness within the community, but on the other hand he wants to help the nation equalize itself to the perceived level of the Western imperialists. The hero’s efforts to reconcile these cross-purposes create a dual anxiety on his part. For example, it is lamentable that guns and dynamite have displaced kung fu as the predominant form of self-defense in China, but this loss contrasts with the nationalist doctrine seeking world parity through adopting Western science and war technologies. Therefore, British colonialism and its effects on the sociopolitical landscape of China established the hallmark of pre-Hollywood martial arts films.

Developed from Wong Fei-hung films, Hong Kong martial arts cinema incorporated Bruce Lee’s kung-fu style, Jeet Kune Do, into kung-fu classics such as The Big Boss, Fists of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon.⁴⁰Close In “The Kung Fu Craze,” David Desser illustrates the wide impact of the martial arts genre as a top box office draw. At the forefront of the wave of kung-fu films coming into U.S. markets was Warner Brothers Pictures. Documenting the role of Warner Brothers in producing Enter the Dragon, Desser describes the tension between producing films to capitalize on an emergent bankable product and negotiating the complex web of consumer identity politics in order to appeal to several racial demographics. Thus, John Saxon was added to the project in hopes of securing white mainstream crossover appeal, and also Jim Kelly, now a legend as an African American action hero.⁴¹Close These films were popular in urban and working-class neighborhoods, where on Saturday afternoons, “kung-fu theater” enabled urban youths without bankrolls or fancy gadgetry to gain empowerment through cultural fantasy. Not having access to the Terminator’s robotics or Mission: Impossible technology, audiences knew that the martial arts hero relied only on his body to kick or punch his way out of a cornered situation. As part of its central appeal, this self-sufficiency approach was a staple theme from which audiences received pleasure and temporary empowerment through racial fantasy. In one way, the construction of racial fantasy by communities of color was an indirect form of opposition to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s frantic production of racial apocalypse. According to recent scholarship on black cultural appropriation of orientalia, sometimes bodies are the only things that really matter.⁴²Close Because these populations were experientially and literally beaten by institutional racism, material poverty, and surveillance by the police state, audience members gravitated toward “virtue lost and found, individual determination, righteous vengeance, and community struggle against all odds.”⁴³Close Thus, as Amy Ongiri puts it, “African American attraction to Asian culture via martial arts films provides a telling moment of slippage and indeterminacy in which notions of totalitarian nature of power and western notions of aesthetics, culture, and dominance are undone.”⁴⁴Close The oppositional gaze of communities of color often represented a negation of whiteness “by any means necessary,” which meant forming Asian-black spectatorship that refused Hollywood’s hegemonic pressure to assimilate into white spectatorship.

Through his epic and farcical improvisations, Lee has wide appeal for communities of color; as Dead Prez raps, “karate meant empty hands, so that it was then perfect for the poor man.” Youths of color identified with Lee’s iconography of class empowerment, making interracial identifications that simply ignored the dominant imperatives of film culture through the visual fetishism of white bodies. Often after watching a matinee, youths of color would go to the streets to mimic what they had just seen on the movie screen. Symbolizing the power of a lone hero able to fight for the needs of the community, youths of color felt empowered and free for a fleeting moment when dropping flying dragon kicks or making exaggerated “kung-fu” sounds. Interracial mimicking in the public sphere of urban streets opened up their imaginations and produced emergent conceptions of cross-cultural exchange that linked the politics of social movements with kung-fu matinee leisure practices. Despite these early formations of kung-fu subcultures, today’s martial arts buddy films are still responding to the contradictions of market democracy’s diverse symptoms: the Watts riots, the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the dismantling of affirmative action programs, the Gulf War, the men’s movement of the early 1990s, and the War on Terror. Finally, they reveal a certain anxiety over how white masculinity imagines itself in the global context of managing empire, and they address the ways in which white racial superiority, predicated within the logic of multiculturalism, is located not only in visual hegemony but also in institutional and military power tout court.

Set in the waterfront district of Oakland, California, Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Romeo Must Die is a martial arts action film centered around a territorial turf war between Asian American and African American crime families, both vying for control of a four-square-mile low-rent district. From the opening shot, the cityscape of San Francisco juxtaposed with large Chinese ideograms and dubbed with the hypnotic beats of a hip-hop soundtrack establishes from the very get-go the key markers of race. Showcasing the martial arts of Hong Kong hero Jet Li and the acting debut of the late hip-hop diva Aaliyah, this modern-day interpretation of Shakespeare’s love tragedy makes an interesting departure from the original by incorporating the admixture of race and romance (or the lack thereof).

In contrast, Rush Hour, directed by Brett Ratner (known for his buddy film bonanzas in the Lethal Weapon series), opens in a more dissonant manner than does Romeo Must Die. A helicopter shot zooms from a skyline that could be Everycity to a seaport dock bustling with workers, commerce, and trade, a location where departures and arrivals from destinations unknown load and unload capital goods. It is at this precise moment that the audience deciphers the visual and aural markers of race—the orientalized music of tympani and gongs, Chinese ideograms scripted on shops signs, and the harbor boats with large unfolding sails worked by a nameless and faceless mass. The location is signified as Hong Kong, and the spectator is placed in an exotic and mysterious land awaiting the handover from British colonialism to mainland Chinese control. Not before the cultural artifacts of the Chinese nation-state, its collective historical and cultural memory, are looted and commodified, however. Rush Hour then is premised on this theft of Chinese cultural heirlooms, its Ming vases, Tang artwork, and Qing bronze statues, by an old British diplomat, who, prior to the handover, conscripts an Asian gang to transport the rare items from their indigenous resting place. Enter Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, playing Inspector Lee and Detective Carter, respectively, two police officers from opposite sides of the cultural globe who team up to solve a murder-kidnapping caper involving Counsel Han’s daughter in Los Angeles, a crucial racial and capitalist epicenter for the Hong Kong film circuit.

Whereas Rush Hour follows a generic formula with a male/male buddy pair, Romeo Must Die uniquely teams a male/female partnership. As an intersection of gender and race, the Asian-black interface of Romeo Must Die lends a crucial and important corrective to the homosocial world of the standard buddy format and allows audiences to grapple with Asian-black visual images that set and subvert representational boundaries of prescribed Hollywood production codes. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative,” Laura Mulvey sees the construction of gender relations in classic Hollywood cinema through binaries of male/female, active/passive, subject/object.⁴⁵Close I would like to use this framework of dialectical oppositions to situate the racialized gaze in martial arts buddy cinema as Asian male/black female, Asian male/black male, and racial insider/racial outsider. Yet the dialectical oppositions of active/passive and subject/object are not coherently tied to one identity at the exclusion of another. It is this fluidity and blurred distinction of power relations that differentiates this genre from the usual suspects of white hero/black buddy films. Also, through the operations of the cinematic apparatus and racialized suture, the regulation of race and sexuality in these buddy films instantiates a language of violence and humor that marks the Asian-black male body as distinct from its martial arts and blaxploitation predecessors.

In Rush Hour and Romeo Must Die, the function of Asian-black buddies is different from the traditional Hollywood team of a white hero and black sidekick. Representations of Asian-black buddies break down master-slave power differentials because of their shared history of racialization under white supremacy. The black buddy, as in the Lethal Weapon series (also directed by Ratner), embodies the traits of the white female—the “comforter, nurturer, and partner,” what I playfully term the Danny Glover syndrome.⁴⁶Close In order to reestablish the ethos of a white male savior protecting white femininity and the nuclear family from racial or national evil—for instance, the evil, butt-kicking Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4—the racialized buddy functions to support white manhood, which ultimately negates the subjectivity of women of color.⁴⁷Close In contrast, the Asian-black buddy team parallels equal partnerships between Asians and blacks who have historically formed alliances to produce more powerful political blocs, including coalitions like the Non-Aligned Movement and Black/Yellow Power. But more than this, certain issues and ideas concerning Asian immigration, U.S. military intervention in Asia, and the power of black cultural resistance enters the narrative structure of these films, forming a politics of cultural engagement and mutual respect for each other’s specific racialization. The disjuncture of immigration and the violence of war displaces the body of the Asian male hero from U.S. national culture, whereas in Rush Hour and Romeo Must Die the black buddy reinscripts the palimpsest body of the Asian male hero with an understanding of African American male racialization. Certain narrative devices are used to accomplish this reinscription through the binoculars of an Asian-black perspective that specifies the differentiation of the Asian/Asian American dichotomy. One such example is found in Romeo Must Die when Han’s brother is lynched by hanging from a tree, which does not need explanation to connect to the history of black men hanging as “strange fruit” in the Jim Crow South. This scene replays visually the history of violence and lynching directed at black men by the most popular voluntary organization in U.S. history, the Ku Klux Klan. That history is coded through the Asian male body. Graphically enjoining the Asian male body with U.S. racial terrorism, this scene frames the process of assimilation as injury onto foreign bodies outside the body politic of the U.S. nation-state.

In the scenes of first contact between Lee and Carter in Rush Hour and Han and Trish in Romeo Must Die, misrecognition by the black buddy occurs because the body of the martial arts hero performs class and gender mimesis of Asian American men’s racialization and stereotypes. This type of racial/gender mimesis engenders questioning the axis of assimilation/racial difference within the architecture of U.S. racial hierarchy and Asian-black competition for economic, cultural, and political entitlements. The performance of racial and class mimesis by the martial arts hero situates him on the border between social categories, exposing how the cinematic apparatus inscribes variegated citizenship.⁴⁸Close There is an exhibition value for unraveling the messiness tied to citizen formation in the performance of racial and class mimesis in the martial arts genre. Racial and class mimesis performs the function of assimilation gone awry. Insofar as the nation-state regulates racial assimilation through national culture, racial and class mimesis allows for political mobility. Because of his physicality and ingenuity, the figure of the martial arts hero is boundless, mobile, and fluid across rigid distinctions. As such, the martial arts hero documents the immigrant experience of Asian American representability and subjectivity.⁴⁹Close In Rush Hour, the entire comedic performance is premised upon the clash of cultures between African Americans and Asian foreigners. The latter are marked in Asian American communities as broken-English-speaking, fashion-challenged immigrants who remind those Asians in the United States of their “Asianness” by connecting the traumatic history of U.S. imperialism in Asia to the present. The construction then of “Asianness” illustrates a displacement of historical time for present time. “Asianness” sets up clearly the assimilationist/nativist binary, illustrating those loyal subjects who assimilate into the national citizenry and those suspect individuals who cannot. Detective Carter functions as a hip, highly sexualized, streetwise buddy who makes the audience laugh by misrecognizing, presupposing, and translating U.S. mainstream culture as detrimental and African American culture as resistance to Lee. As such, interracial communication and dialogic racialization produces Asian-black buddies unwilling to conform to masculinities of intercultural war, contestation, and militarism.

Although the camera zooms to Lee at the door of the newly arrived airplane from Hong Kong, the angle from the tarmac represents Carter’s perspective. Subsequently, the spectator hears the sound of an orientalizing gong, supposedly a commonsense aural marker of Lee’s outside status in terms of race, nationality, and sexuality. The foreign status of Inspector Lee represents the hypersexualized yet nonheteronormative Asian multitude, what cultural critic Robert Lee terms a “third sex location” referencing the dominant threat of Yellow Peril hysteria. Therefore, in the role that Angel Island served previously, the airport represents a social space of entry and transgression, a space that is a locus of cultural, racial, and sexual definitions of insider and outsider, and this is where most of the humor derives initially. But instead of the gaze of the immigration state, via the eyes and medical instruments of white officials, Detective Carter establishes the gaze of black manhood and culture, which has encoded American orientalism onto the Asian male body.

When Inspector Lee meets Carter, the former does not say a word, thus seemingly reproducing Asian American racialization as the silent minority. Responding to the silent space, Carter constitutes onto the Asian male body stereotypes of Asian accents through a black performance of yellowface. Carter misrecognizes Lee as such (this is significant) and proceeds to produce his comic effect by performing black mimesis of yellowface, asking in exaggerated and obnoxious terms: “Do you speakuh English … Do you understand the words coming outta my mouth?” Positioning the spectator in the vantage point of an objective eye, the camera zooms to Lee just smiling, and the two-shot records Detective Carter physically turning his back on Lee. This refusal represents the negation of interracial identification or even an acknowledgment of Lee’s humanity and mirrors the kind of liberal discourse used to explain such interracial cultural misrecognition between Koreans and blacks in Los Angeles. Carter clearly stakes out the subjectivity of the insider, and his interracial mimesis of yellowface establishes the boundaries of comedic performance, affect culture, and national belonging.⁵⁰Close As situated in opposition to newly arrived immigrants, he operates as a racialized policeman of U.S. national identity and culture, much like Shaquille O’Neal in the Shaq–Yao Ming media battle. In this manner, the camera does not ask the spectator, through a classic shot–reverse shot, to identify with the two men of color, and thus an oppositional gaze is nonexistent. Therefore, the camerawork, dialogue, and comedic performance produce a form of racialized suture that creates interracial difference as flippant and hyperreal through black excess and patriotic policing.

In Romeo Must Die, the entertainment value found in the engine of the plot and dialogue centers primarily on the sublimated sexual tension between Han and Trish in the kung-fu action scenes. However, along with imitating a stereotypical South Asian taxi driver named Achebar, Han performs instances of interracial mimesis including mimicking a foreign Chinese delivery boy. Trish functions marginally as a support buddy, performing this role similarly to Detective Carter, although her sexuality and good looks act as an object for the scopophilic male gaze. This function is demonstrated when Trish gets into a cab driven by Han: the camera frames a full shot of her, then cuts to the rearview mirror showing Han looking at her. The spectator is in the scene, looking at Han gazing at Trish through the rearview mirror, so that Han’s gaze is the active center of this scene by the visual representations. Adding a unique, gendered dimension to the buddy picture format, Trish performs the function of the classic fetish.⁵¹Close By negating Trish’s gaze, the scene marginalizes the black female body as merely an object, and the racialized gazes from Han to Trish secure this reading initially. Cinematic citizenship in this particular scene designates a political, class, and sexual subjectivity found in Asian-black spectatorship. Maintained by the political gaze regulating cinematic citizenship, the romantic subjectivity given to most action hero leads is cut off in this scene by the operation of the racialized and sexualized suture.

In Rush Hour and Romeo Must Die, the martial arts hero is a palimpsest figure in the kung-fu buddy picture because he is expunged of the typical leading man’s sexuality, even being denied a romantic kiss, a standard reward for the white male action hero. Beneath the overt visual economy of sexuality, the martial arts hero is reinscribed with violence par excellence. As Chris Straayer states in “Redressing the ‘Natural,’” the classic kiss in Hollywood cinema represents sexuality. The symbolic power of the kiss “derives from its dual metaphoric and metonymic function. It both stands in for sexual activity and begins it.”⁵²Close Similar to the erasure of the homosexual kiss in classic cinema, the disavowal of a romantic subjectivity for the martial arts hero renders him, in Judith Halberstam’s words, a sanitized subjectivity. Underlining this erasure, this process is a sexual bleaching and signals the anxiety of producers about the overdetermined sexuality of the hero.

The genre sanitizes all connotations of libido in the figure of the martial arts hero except as expressed through racialized violence. We see this exemplified in Romeo Must Die, in which the only physical contact that simulates intimacy of touch is in a fight scene. The fight scene that teams Han and Trish against an Asian female reinscribes violence and sexual miscegenation for the reproduction of Hollywood production codes in kung-fu cinema. Thus, this fight scene maps the parameters not only of Asian American male sexual regulation but also of Asian-black antimiscegenation, and routes this taboo through choreographed violence. In Rush Hour, most of the explicit sexual energy is exhibited by Detective Carter, who manages to perform a stereotypical representation of black heterosexuality consisting of an overdetermined status and masculine bravado. However, in contrast with Bruce Lee, whose humor was inadvertent or minimalist at best, Jackie Chan uses his bodily violence for comic affect, often narrowly escaping mortal wounds through last minute heroics that do not illustrate his invincibility but rather his vulnerability. In “The Construction of Black Sexuality,” Jacquie Jones offers the idea that buddy pictures, films that portray a white male hero and a black sidekick, represent black male sexuality in the form of violence. She evinces the idea that “violent differentiation” is a substitute for black heterosexuality.⁵³Close Her idea suggests that violence and race represent coded sexuality. As such, violence and gender mimesis produces black male subjectivity in the diegetic, or narrative structure of film texts.

In Romeo Must Die, Trish teases Han with sexual innuendo—“I like the yellow one”; “Is it true what they say about Asian men?”—as a measured barometer for the incessant antimiscegenation rule dictating the racial romance in the film. She functions as a black female, delegitimizing black male heterosexuality in that her refusal of the romantic advances of black male characters (Maurice and Mac) represents the denial of black male sexuality. In both cases, racial differentiation engenders a masculine homosocial world that mostly negates racialized femininity, because in the end, critical representations should have not only functionality but also creativity and agency. If market democracy “entails the gradual emergence of civil society and the citizen-subject of the state out of the barbaric prehistory of human society,” then the martial arts genre, much like the developmental narrative found in liberal assumptions of freedom and individual agency, reworks the standardized tropes of the more whitewashed buddy pictures but still relegates other “forms of opposition or sociality” to the margins of the diegetic.⁵⁴Close

In her article “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” Lalitha Gopalan provides a useful mapping of how genre functions in order for the spectator to identify with the visceral images. This act then provides an opportunity for a critical understanding of why certain genres reproduce themselves repeatedly. It penetrates to the heart of consumer desire and material anticipation. Gopalan writes: “Only genre simultaneously addresses the industry’s investment in standardized narratives for commercial success on the one hand, and the spectator’s pleasure in genre films with their stock narratives structured around repetition and difference on the other.”⁵⁵Close She links the ideological and production investments in the workings of genres, but her definition omits how genres transform over time and mutate into different forms through processes in constant renegotiation with the political and economic circumstances of cultural productions. We see this process in motion by locating Jackie Chan and Jet Li as two distinct martial arts heroes; the former invokes a different kind of kung fu, namely complex fight scenes using set pieces and slapstick humor as a means to produce desire and affect in Asian-black spectatorship, whereas the latter follows the tradition established by Bruce Lee in using his body as a narcissistic vehicle for spectatorial identification.⁵⁶Close

The mortal combat between Han and his black counterparts and the suppression of a romantic relationship between Han and Trish is a measured critique of the economy of masculinity and femininity circulating in the film. Interracial fighting and interracial sanitization unveils the white-black-Asian triangulation including Han’s unnamed relationship with the white developers. Establishing citizenship as property ownership, this triangulation reveals the set of property relations narrated by the film, which exposes the contradictions of urban blight and white financial capital. The critical evaluation of the masculinist investment in private property is the film’s attempt to conceal the contradictions of liberal individualism, its possessive assumptions concerning land accumulation versus communal ownership.

Early in Romeo Must Die, Mr. Roth, who represents elite white developers, meets Isaac O’Day, head of a black crime organization. They negotiate their plans to secure property deeds over a round of golf at a neatly manicured golf course. Responding to Roth’s pressure to complete the transfer of low-rent property to secure land for building a multimillion-dollar sports stadium for an NFL football team, O’Day states that he “knows” the streets and thus will be able to convince the remaining holdouts who have so far refused to sell their property. We see a full shot framing all the men together in the same homosocial space, arguing over limited land issues. O’Day then takes his golf shot, his ball landing in a sand trap. In a two-shot with O’Day, the camera centers on Roth. Now his knowledge and not his body is on display, telling O’Day that golf is a “game of finesse and not power.” Later, Roth breaks down the intricacies of the golf swing including the alignment of the wrists and hips, the most effective stance, and the balance of the feet. As Roth swings a fluid golf stroke, with a quick cut to his golf ball landing close to the hole, knowledge and power are sutured to the white male body.

Although Roth represents the stereotype of the unscrupulous Jew, the film does not focus on this dynamic as much as it does on the Asian-black racial battle for limited property rights. Throughout the golf course scene, many convergent layers of meaning circulate in the discourse about private property including Social Darwinism, nineteenth-century raciology, and Jewish incorporation into the category of whiteness.⁵⁷Close Moreover, the editing of the scene ties the spectator to the accuracy of Roth’s explanations describing masculinity in coded language, in which white men ultimately have the knowledge and power to maneuver around street “thugs” like O’Day. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris explains that the capacity for ownership of private property in the United States has always been constitutive of a social, economic, and cultural construction of a white identity. That is, a person has subjectivity, agency, and ultimately citizenship only when the equation “whiteness equals property” is realized.⁵⁸Close When the camera closes in on O’Day’s demoralized face after his failure, the shot accentuates that the “game” is based on rules over which he has little control.

As this golf game is an allegory for the “game” of propertied masculinity, Roth has the intricate knowledge needed to mastermind, like a puppet master, crime bosses and corporate financial scams. Not only does he condescendingly teach O’Day the mental aspects of the game, the word “finesse” connotes the ability of white national manhood to master the bourgeois game of golf through sports knowledge gained from the application of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Yet also, the regime of knowledge Roth commands enables him to feel a sense of security and modern personhood, a self-assuredness in property ownership and Western epistemologies of cognition that registers little threat from O’Day, condemned by colonial discourse to biological inferiority, the trace of his all-brawn-no-brains masculinity. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick illustrates in her Epistemology of the Closet, for any modern questioning of homosocial and homoerotic spaces, “knowledge/ignorance is more than merely one in a metonymic chain of such binarisms … knowledge meaning in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual ignorance.”⁵⁹Close

Thus, O’Day can be read as legitimating and reproducing this hierarchy of white knowledge. His position as an outsider to bourgeois leisure activities leaves no choice but to evaluate his masculinity in the terms set forth by Roth. That is, the homosocial quid pro quo exchange between Roth and O’Day reinstitutes the logic of how masculinity is prefigured upon the movement from structural considerations of power to the biologistic-cultural paradigm. O’Day can be seen as both refusing the uneven relations of power between himself and Roth by asserting his “excessive” masculinity in terms of a “powerful unknowing as unknowing,” and consenting to the hegemonic and reproductive framework established by Roth in rearticulating an essentialist binary of finesse/power.⁶⁰Close Even later in the film, when O’Day tries to become “legit” by aspiring to the “owner’s box” of the stadium development plan, he is shot and thus disciplined by his lieutenant, Mac, for his ambitions. Black-on-black crime becomes the dominant policing mechanism to admonish “uppity” black men who, in popular sport, perform entertainment, head coaching, and broadcasting labor while being denied access to ownership positions. While deploying a familiar trope in a familiar genre as a vehicle for circumscribing the plethora of maleness seen in the film (notice the lack of women such as mothers, wives, and romantic partners), the system upheld by the film justifies this occupational barrier for black assertions for propertied inclusion and decision-making power.

Resituating white masculinity in relation to cinematic citizenship, the narrative of whiteness in martial arts buddy films has to reimagine a universal, modern subject that is still white, but also on the criminal margins. In this sense, whiteness in mainstream film culture seems to need a white misfit who can be discounted. Much of the martial arts genre then uses the matchup between white criminals and racialized men as cops. White corporate crime represents whiteness as anachronistic, out-of-step with modern liberal progress based on law and order. This portrayal includes white men such as Roth, the pseudoaristocratic land developer in Romeo Must Die, and even the British ex–colonial official in Rush Hour. As such, they do not represent the benevolent, enlightened, heterosexual white male liberal. What we see in recent mainstream productions with racialized men is a troubled dualism constitutive of identification and disidentification. The genre requires the martial arts hero to punish other racialized men, who in the filmic narrative must be represented as the real threat, in front of the camera, committing the violence and off-limits transgressions. In this way, the sinister work of white supremacy is then hidden in the films, like a negative photographic imprint that is mostly invisible and forgotten.

As many critics of multiculturalism have stated, the new multicultural era has instituted more representations of people of color, but at the same time conceals the lack of actual political and economic power engendered to those groups. Conveying political correctness without real motivation for social transformation, the politics of racial visibility hides the culpability of white power in both cinematic form and narrative.⁶¹Close In particular, one function of film culture sets up points of identification for the audience in staking out divisions between citizen and outsider based on race and thus those to whom the cinematic apparatus sutures the audience, and those to whom it does not.

Nevertheless, audience identification or disidentification is also predicated upon the spectator’s position in relation to social categories of differentiation. Due to the rhetoric of meritocracy and equal opportunity through standardized testing, multicultural market democracy must conceal the material privileges hidden within the category of whiteness; it must also sublimate and assuage, by the mediation of national culture, the guilt, anxieties, and hostilities of “angry white men” who, in the post–civil rights era, have been named as injured subjects of the reconstitution of white supremacy. Displacing culpability and responsibility onto other racialized men or white corporate crime, the visual culture of popular film regulates the dialogic racialization of Asian and black communities in cultural revolutions and counterrevolutions. When the Asian-black interface goes astray from presumed liberal goals of equal opportunity and self-sustained achievement, the buddies as racial cops help secure the promise of the U.S. nation-state by subduing white criminals. Yet racialized men as cops are violent, stereotyped caricatures, nullifying any incisive critique of white supremacy until the end, through interracial solidarity. These cops stand for law and order, but they somehow always remain outside modern society. In this sense, they enforce the law, but they are not self-disciplining citizen-subjects.

In Rush Hour, the clash of national cultures and the deployment of black culture as a site for critiquing U.S. imperialism abroad and the police state at home are worked through the buddy team. Establishing the role of the police state and the status of foreigners, Counsel Han tells the FBI, “I am not an American. My daughter is not an American.” In not-so-subtle terms, this statement sets the stage for Chinese nationals and U.S. police powers to engage in the political field of national belonging and transpacific migration. In a scene depicting Inspector Lee coming to the United States to help Counsel Han, the FBI’s Agent Russ says to Agent Whiting: “That’s all I need is a foreign national getting his head blown off and turning this into an international incident.” As a sexual connotation in literary and filmic analysis, the reference to decapitation in the dialogue presages the romantic castration of the martial arts hero. Equating violence with sexuality, the FBI, as a representative of the racial state, foreshadows the regulation of cinematic citizenship through the specter of symbolic castration. In the ensuing dialogue between the agents, a classic shot–reverse shot sutures the spectator to the point of view of the FBI. The FBI has a history of undertaking counterinsurgency measures, including its infamous COINTEL (Counterintelligence) program, as a means to disunite social and racial classes. More specifically, the spectator is sutured to the nation-state’s police powers, which disparage, in their words, “Chung King” cops and instead recruit LAPD keystone cops.

In one scene, Detective Carter wants to show Mann’s Chinese Theater to Inspector Lee. In the car ride to the tourist site, the camera moves side to side in the two-shot frame and thus reinforces identification for a racialized gaze. Depending on the spectator’s worldview, the racialized gaze can be oppositional and critical, or it can be mimetic and conciliatory. When the two arrive, the camera is positioned at street level, framing the two buddies in a single frame looking up, with Mann’s Chinese Theater in the background. Carter says, “but I want to show you something,” and functions as the buddy who shows, translates, and confirms what the audience is soon expecting: the inauthentic representation of “Chineseness,” Mann’s Chinese Theater, collides with the martial arts hero, who is supposedly the authentic personification of “Chineseness.” In this hyperreal collision between simulacra and authenticity, the black buddy functions to show just how incompatible the martial arts hero is with the collective U.S. national mythology that incorporates Hollywood cultural imperialism. Therefore, when Carter exclaims, “just like home ain’t it,” his hands widespread showcasing the monument in all its glory, the spectator through the process of suture is cued to laugh at the incongruence. In true Hollywood caricature, the humor derives from two sources: both Carter’s overdetermined ignorance (“ain’t never been to China, but I bet it looks just like this, don’t it”) and Lee’s overdetermined sense of loss in seemingly his own world of “Chineseness.” Through the full shot of Mann’s Chinese Theater, Lee’s naïveté and Carter’s ignorance produce the desired effect. As such, the racialization of both men is disabled, Lee culturally and Carter intellectually. Both ignite the humor and pleasure the spectator is asked to enjoy at their expense.

Showcasing the collective cultural memory of white national manhood, the Asian-black buddies encounter the sidewalk footprints of John Wayne. For so many, Wayne is the ubiquitous icon and embodiment of the Western hero—or, simply put, the representative cultural imperialist par excellence. After portraying throughout his extensive movie career the genocide of Native Americans, the repulsion of General Santa Anna, and the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, the Duke gets immortalized with his footprints in concrete. Insofar as the Duke is a heroic embodiment of U.S. imperial power, his presence in the frame literally concretizes classic Hollywood cinema’s exclusion of Asians in the United States from cultural representability. The camerawork brings alive the cultural myth of the Duke, his grandiose persona, which is framed in a closeup shot of his larger-than-life feet at a tourist attraction symbolizing U.S. cultural power.

In this defining scene of cultural crisis, the camera works in the classic shot–reverse shot, moving from the gazes of the racialized men and from, unbelievably, the gaze of the footprints! Finally, as spectators, we are sutured to identify with the racialized men, but it is in relation to the Duke, whose feet are literally and figuratively too large for the martial arts hero to fill. Inspector Lee’s first words in English, “John Wayne,” are telling because they represent the collision between the two kinds of hero traditions outlined earlier in this essay. Symbolically, Carter informs the martial arts hero that his feet are not big enough to fit into the collective memory of the nation-state. The scene depicts the exclusion of Asian men from “standing in” as representatives of U.S. masculinity by reminding the nation of its collective memory in wars against Japan in World War II, China and North Korea during the Korean conflict, and the Viet Cong in Vietnam. Thus the logics in the scene show how masculinity works within this homosocial world, including idealizing white subjectivity, making invisible Chineseness, and negating women of color from representation.

Because of this incommensurability between assimilation and racial exclusion, the Asian-black buddy team constructs an alliance based on the common ground of racial oppression and thus forms alternative sites of disidentification for citizenship. More specifically, the Asian-black team routes this inclusion through African American culture and history. However, this trajectory neglects to emphasize the places where Asian American culture and history have resisted cultural erasure or where Asian-black shared history has created subversive forms of alternative social relations. In this way, a mural on a background brick wall depicting African American blues musicians and singers foreshadows later scenes in which Tucker functions to construct citizenship through the perspective of black history, trauma, and culture.

Framed by a consistent two-shot, Lee requests a ride to Counsel Han’s location; Carter responds, “Man, just sit there and shut up, this ain’t no democracy.” In “‘Something’s Missing Here!’ Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934–1962,” Chon Noriega suggests that the Production Code Administration censored homosexuality in all filmmaking. Critical reviews along with audience responses influenced the reception of homoerotic films and muted the homosexual content within.⁶²Close Likewise, martial arts buddy pictures conformed to certain Hollywood production codes and sanitized political and homoerotic content to a more individualized and thematic paradigm. Lee urgently responds to Carter’s declaration: “Yes, it is,” whereby Carter admonishes, “I’m Michael Jackson, you Tito.” Inspector Lee ignores the power dynamic infused in the remark and queries, “why wouldn’t they want my help?” Finally, Carter lays it all on the line, referencing literally the FBI, but more generally the United States: “Because they don’t give a damn about you.”

The two-shot frames the homosociality in this scene, positioning the racialized gaze as an outsider/insider binary representing citizenship. The cinematic apparatus does not suture the spectator to the racialized buddies, and the spectator is not asked by the cinematic shots to identify as “that’s me” but instead to listen in, to eavesdrop on the conversation. Afterward, the buddies are seated in the car again, listening to the radio and discussing the politics of national culture. Inspector Lee hears the Beach Boys as an interpellative form of U.S. national culture, in this case the popular music of U.S. cultural imperialism disseminated to all parts of the globe. He says: “Ah, Beach Boys great American music,” whereby Carter abruptly switches the radio station to hip-hop, saying, “don’t ever touch a black man’s radio.”

In a reworking of Louis Althusser’s classic formulation of interpellation, the state hails Lee through “great American music.”⁶³Close Nevertheless, while Lee begins to misrecognize the promises of the state as an illusory promiser of political embodiment, Carter watches the intoxicating power of American national culture mesmerizing his partner. He then disrupts Lee’s subjection to the state/culture power axis. As a technological arm of cultural expression, the radio signifies the cultural space in which African Americans are able to resist the silencing of their voice.⁶⁴Close Carter’s warning, “Beach Boys going get you a great ass whipping,” reflects the history of white violence and terror directed toward African American men. Realizing the missteps of blacks caught up in racial uplift without critiquing whiteness and democracy, Carter continues his commentary: “You can do that in China, but you get yourself killed over here man. I’ll show you some real music. Hear.” The camera finally utilizes the classic shot–reverse shot between Lee and Carter, which begins the process of identification suturing the spectator to the buddy team, while Carter says, “now that’s music.” This is by no means a coincidence. While the Beach Boys’ music represents a demographic audience of largely white listeners, hip-hop has its origins in African American and Caribbean traditions of blues, reggae, and bebop, pressure-cooked under urban renewal that called attention to racism, poverty, and the police state.⁶⁵Close

Some may argue that hip-hop has been co-opted by the homogenizing influence of capital, yet Rush Hour represents this cultural expression as a critique of equating U.S. national culture with whiteness. Once Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses have been systematically broken down, the coalition building begins for an interracial alliance, through an Asian-black interface of cultural translation and politicized unity. Carter moves in a breakdance style, showcasing the “snake” move, and shouts: “Can you do that to the Beach Boys?” He then answers emphatically: “Hell, nah.” As a subtext using certain production codes, the looks between Carter and Lee intersect with various racialized gazes from the audience and construct an oppositional gaze through cultural translation and collective historical remembrance.

The quintessential “bonding scene” between Lee and Carter breaks down the pillar of U.S. cultural imperialism through a communal, critical kind of interracial social engagement within a transpacific interracial conversation based on a shared history of dialogic racialization. The lone martial arts hero, no longer rooted in self-alienation, forges political bonds with members of other excluded groups. Before encountering the Asian gang that has kidnapped Counsel Han’s daughter for ransom, Lee and Carter are at the Foo-Chow restaurant in a two-shot, waiting outside for the right opportunity to “bum rush” the Asian gang. While sitting in the car, the camera positions a shot–reverse shot, suturing the spectator to Lee when he hears on the radio Bruce Springsteen’s rendition of “War.” Still in that frame, Lee sings verbatim the song’s lyrics: “War! Huh! / What is it good for?/Absolutely nothing.” In this pivotal scene for cinematic citizenship, the song’s lyrics suture the audience to interracial solidarity through the soundtrack and corresponding singing.

On one level, the song’s lyrics function to call into question the role of U.S. imperialism in Asia while, in the context of the film, highlighting the return of the martial arts hero to the imperial center. Lee’s ventriloquism of an antiwar song performed in the wake of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars calls into question the twin ideological fences of market democracy and militarism spread throughout the world that culminated in various wars in the “Far” and “Middle” East.⁶⁶Close In many ways, the refusal of the Asian male body, as the discursive site where U.S. cultural imperialism and militarism are etched, denies complicity in such systems of violence and global hegemony and also challenges unreflective patriotism. On another level, the song’s lyrics are used to underline thematically the tensions between Asian American and African American cultures, a conflict-ridden history with its volcanic eruption in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Following this, Detective Carter adds his own flavor, recoding the song through black cultural expressions. Showcasing hip-hop dance moves, his response is a dialogic engagement with Lee’s implicit extension of friendship. War in the form of social division is definitely not an effective response to racial divisions. The camera works to suture the audience in this scene, using comedic energy in framing a two-shot, then the all-important shot–reverse shot. Through racialized suture, Carter works off Lee’s humorous rendition and adds a performance of hip-hop moves with the martial arts hero. Elevating the humor through mutual teamwork and Asian-black codes of affect culture, Carter’s performance stabilizes the homosocial space by educating and translating the politics of culture and citizenship for the martial arts hero through the active body of black racialization. Thus, this maneuver produces a more egalitarian equation than that of the standard buddy format seen in Hollywood. It creates a common bond based upon common exclusions, and constructs their race and masculinity based upon mutual respect for each other. At the end of this scene, the two members of the buddy team teach each other their respective cultural traditions, kung-fu and hip-hop moves, as a means to unearth the compromises and knowledge needed to be culturally engaged and mutually respectful of each other.

Forming a politics of reflexivity, interracial alliance engenders a critique of the social and cultural structures that keep buddies marginal. Through the process of cultural exchange, the shot–reverse shot affirms this newfound cohesion. The buddy picture genre, then, is reworked by a move toward egalitarian traditions evoking civic republicanism and the need for community-based solidarity. At the end of the hilarious scene, after teaching each other hip-hop and kung-fu moves, the two mockingly point guns at each other in order to snatch the guns away. As an oppositional gaze about power, the two-shot here works to produce spectatorial identification with the buddies’ newfound friendship. While boisterously laughing together, Carter and Lee point guns at each other’s throats and acknowledge the foolishness of “war.” As the pair dances in synchronicity, the audience sees them moving down the sidewalk, arms pumping up and down in unison. From the third eye, with their backs turned to the audience, the political gaze is racialized, disrupted, and destabilized.

This “rule of equality” is represented, once again, by the incorporation of the “dozens,” an oral tradition in black folk culture that is also an antecedent to the raps of hip-hop MCs. This oral form entails participants creating lyrical lists back and forth in order to masculinize their verbal messages with punch lines, dramatic effect, wit, and humor. Realizing that both their fathers were police officers, Carter and Lee try to “outdo” each other through hyperbole by narrating their fathers’ exploits. The shot–reverse shot works to suture the audience into the space of fantasy and wish fulfillment: “My daddy arrested fifteen people”; “My father arrested twenty-five people”; “My daddy saved five crack heads from a burning building”; “My father caught a bullet with his own hand”; “My daddy kick your daddy’s ass.” Aside from the Oedipal subtext in all this talk about fathers, the playful quid pro quo exchange finalizes Lee’s ability to comprehend and take part in U.S. national culture. Using black folk culture and verbal assault, this exchange is much like a poetry slam. While on an equal footing with Carter, Lee can definitely “speakuh English,” and he thus has gained Carter’s respect and admiration. Carter formalizes this interracial alliance by exclaiming in the ensuing fight with the Asian gang: “I’m Blackanese.” As the buddies talk together, dance together, and now fight side by side, Carter instantiates a linguistic and symbolic hybridity that underlines the meaningful cultural exchange in Asianblack spectatorship.

This relationship is not as well determined in Romeo Must Die because of the different dynamics between Han and Trish, but their symbolic union can have empowering connotations in relation to state power, property relations, and interracial romance. The first major fight scene between Han and his black counterparts demonstrates the utilization of interracial mimesis as a means to create a sense of solidarity. Between the fight scenes are suggestive interracial looks through the shot–reverse shot technique, suturing the audience to both Han and Trish. The martial arts hero’s individualism, his lone trek to solve his brother’s lynching, transforms with an interracial alliance with Trish O’Day, the crime boss’s daughter. Here, sexuality and violence intertwine with Hollywood production codes of antimiscegenation in containing the overdetermined bodily agency of the martial arts hero.

On the one hand, the deployment of model minority masculinity is evident in the ways in which Han Sing defeats the O’Day gang through specific strategies and techniques of the state apparatus. Reflecting the problems of racial profiling today, the police have incorporated more sophisticated surveillance techniques and tried-and-true methods of apprehending black males for the prison-industrial complex.⁶⁷Close In this scene, Han enters Trish’s private space when he comes unannounced into her apartment. Trish does not feel threatened by his presence, instead offering to help him. After a discussion about the tracing of his brother’s last telephone call, Han has secured aid from Trish in finding out that the telephone calls were made to her clothing shop. As though a romantic gaze were in place, they then smile at one another when the O’Day gang drives up, headed by the comic figure of Maurice. Han then racially masquerades as a foreign Chinese delivery boy as Maurice and his associates come to the front doorway. Maurice apprehends that Han is not a delivery boy because there is a lack of an “oriental” aroma in the air. Obviously, we then have the much-anticipated martial arts fight scene.

From Han’s vantage point, his gaze is the one the audience sutures to, especially in being the recipient of Maurice’s wisecracks such as calling him “dim sum.” While performing the flying crane position made famous in The Karate Kid, Maurice’s representation of masculinity as excessive and overdetermined is the main engine of humor and clownish behavior. Through his racial mimesis of Ralph Macchio’s famous climactic moment in whitewashed martial arts films, Maurice racializes Han as a Chinatown caricature. The overdetermined ignorance, much like Carter’s, elicits some form of punishment and retribution. Han transforms into a fighting dynamo, and we enter the space/time of the martial arts fight scene. Maurice’s excessive masculinity, his large body size and even larger verbosity, is in contrast to Han’s small frame and few words. In this way, the misrecognition of blacks of the law and police authority is routed through the heavy-handedness of the Asian martial arts disciplinarian. As distinctly opposite the black masculinity of Maurice, we are asked to marvel at Han’s somersault over the stairwell and subsequent flying low kick because the camera is positioned from the vantage point of a third eye. Each punch from the gang is reciprocated with a block, synchronized in a predictable pattern of force-counterforce. Accordingly, the martial arts sequences serve to suture the spectator to the hero, but their “unreality” also reminds the spectator that he or she is in the realm of the imaginary. Indeed, the sheer athleticism and production value of the shots might cause the viewer to ask, “How do they do that?,” thereby taking the spectator out of the reverie of visual pleasure.⁶⁸Close Because dialogue is nonexistent, facial expressions of awe and dismay, frustration and pain are the main visual cues in the martial arts fight scenes. Similar to pornography, the visual culture of martial arts fights is embellished with facial contortions, close-ups, and exaggerations, adding humor and spectator affect to the physical acrobatics.⁶⁹Close In this case, the next round of fighting down the staircase showcases the police tactics of apprehending criminals (and in the process subjecting black males to the prison system). The police tactics are acted out in an overdetermined manner, highlighting the absolute, extraterritorial force and dominance of militarized state power.

The camera follows Han’s gaze as he unleashes plastic hand restraints on his combatants and then goes about whipping them like animals. Such treatment had been popular among slave owners and overseers during the slave trade and on slave plantations, thus showing the unique coupling of an Asian male hero and black “whipping boys.” When Han undresses one of the gang members, hog-ties him, and exposes his gold bikini underwear, the figure of the Asian martial arts hero emasculates black men for their excessive virility. Later, when Han apprehends the black gun from Maurice, unclips the ammunition, and drives off in a black sports utility vehicle, his containment of blackness via African American bodies is total and complete. Through color symbolism, he takes away their virile firepower, he drives off in their ride, and he does all this without breaking a sweat. Trish smiles, and Han’s performance as disciplinarian and racial policeman is complete.

In White Screens, Black Images, James Snead outlines three master codes that provide foundational logics for the production of black representation in classic cinema. From D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to Shirley Temple’s blackface, Snead argues that mythification, marking, and omission were constitutive components for the production codes.⁷⁰Close Mythification is a phantasmagoric relationship constructed in the white imaginary; marking is the construction of blackness through costume, lighting, and contrast; and omission is a reversal, distortion, or some other form of censorship, of the racialization of the black body in cinema. In this sense, these processes use the camera as the liminal spatial and temporal mediator between the image and spectator in designating racialized gazes. In such a construction, it produces the gaze as political through cinematic citizenship.⁷¹Close As such, right before the line of credits, the moment in mainstream cinema when the nuclear white family is consolidated through the classic Hollywood kiss, we see a hug between Han and Trish. The camera then marks the two buddies, walking together over a bridge. This image is significant in reformulating how a major Hollywood production can end. Han takes Trish’s hand and gives her a hug that subverts media representations of Asian-black conflict. As a new political gaze, Asian-black spectatorship, among spectator and screen images, redefines the meaning associated with crossing over, transcending the liminal spaces of symbolic bridges.