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This chapter argues that the rise of martial arts genre has wide appeal for racialized communities and young audiences because it is the genre of the underdog. The martial arts film had its introduction in the Blaxploitation films and the cult hero of Bruce Lee and quickly became a staple of Saturday matinees in urban geographies. 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. As a result, the coupling of a streetwise Black American buddy with hip-hop credentials and an ethical martial arts hero with humble bravado has served notice to mainstream audiences and cultural critics. As such, this chapter examines Asian-Black spectatorship as an oppositional gaze in martial arts buddy films. For this reason, films such as Rush Hour and Romeo Must Die produce Afro-Asian bonds and identification through critiques of white supremacy and neoliberal property relations.

The media had a far-ranging influence on the play of both white and African American South Louisiana children during the period 1967 to 2011. The movies, television, music videos, break dancing, radio, and specific performers like Prince and Michael Jackson electrified school children and gave them new fuel for play. MTV, VH1, and BET all hit the television screen in the early 80s and impacted the young. Black video artists provided African American youth with a sense of “this is us!” and video messages entered play, dance routines, cheerleading, and classroom behavior. Michael Jackson influenced children’s dance and play from 1969 on. His songs inspired all. The media continue to inspire and influence play as television sets proliferate and children watch and imitate even more.

Through a close analysis of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this chapter argues that the film’s successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on a conservative reading of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements in the wuxia shenguai genre. These tensions are problematic precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. However, the film is also capable to generating counter-readings of its politics by recasting itself as a global cinematic text of political irony and oppositional resistance.

The cultural imaginary of kung-fu cinema has been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly, thrusting hands. Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that has often incorporated kung-fu action and iconography. This chapter assesses a broad range of motion pictures that showcase hands in thematically complex and symptomatically relevant ways, be they the severed anatomical remnants of long- departed souls sprung back to life in Witch from Nepal (1986) or the skeletal appendages that comically grab the protagonist’s crotch in Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). This chapter strives to pin down the powerful forces that lay dormant within the genre, including its tendency to dredge up and display moments of excessive, otherwordly violence for which there is seemingly no “rational” explanation.