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Was Bruce Lee Chinese, or American, or British, or What?

Paul Bowman (Cardiff University)

Written for a research seminar talk at the SOAS China Institute, 1st February 2016.

Abstract

This talk poses the question of Bruce Lee’s national identity. Of course, the facts of this matter are widely known: there is no mystery or controversy about the US passport that Bruce Lee held from the age of eighteen. However, one question that constantly recurs is that of his ethno-national ‘cultural identity’: who owns Bruce Lee? China? Bruce Lee is after all ethnically Chinese and his first language was Cantonese. But he was born in San Francisco, raised in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and became a US citizen at eighteen… This multiple, moving, migrant status is not unique to Bruce Lee, of course. But in all of the discourses about him there remain strong drives to ‘place’ him or ‘claim’ him – whether for a place (America, Hong Kong, China, or the world), or a people (Americans, ‘Chinese everywhere’, the colonised subaltern, this or that ethnic minority), or a ‘style’ (Wing Chun Kung Fu, ‘American Freestyle Karate’, even MMA), or an ideology (‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, ‘New Age’, ‘Postmodern’). This paper seeks to interrogate such appropriative impulses, and to examine them in terms offered by several approaches: Derridean deconstruction, Rey Chow’s (Benjaminian) take on ‘culture’, and a Rancièrean notion of ‘policing’. It does so in order to propose certain ways to think critically about acts of cultural ‘placing’.

Two Smashing Epigraphs

Left: from Jing Wu Men; Right: from Enter the Dragon1

Two images of Bruce Lee preside over everything that follows. The first comes from a

scene in which Lee destroys a sign that reads ‘No Dogs And Chinese Allowed’. This

event takes place towards the end of the first half of Fist of Fury (Jīng Wǔ Mén / Zing1

Mou2 Mun4) (Lo 1972). What has happened is this. Chen Zhen (played by Lee) has

been dealing with the iniquities he is becoming more and more aware of in the colonial

Shanghai of the early twentieth century. At the start of the film, the Japanese have

already declared that the recently deceased leader of the Chinese Jing Wu martial arts

1 All pictures are cues for my Prezi presentation, which can be found at: https://prezi.com/08pdqdtll0sb/was-bruce-lee-chinese-or-american-or-british-or-what/

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association (Huo Yuanjia) – and by implication, the entire Chinese race – is the ‘Sick

Man of Asia’.

In the scene from which the image is taken, Lee’s Chen Zhen has just answered the

initial Japanese insult by beating up the entire Japanese martial arts school. On his walk

home, he approaches a public park, the gate of which is guarded by an Indian

attendant, wearing a European-style uniform and a turban (all signs of Empire and

British Colonialism, of course). Chen approaches the gate, but the attendant refuses

him entry, pointing to the sign. Just then, a Western woman walks past with a dog on a

lead. Chen Zhen asks why that is ok. ‘You’re the wrong colour’ says the Indian gate-

keeper.

Noticing this, one of a group of young Japanese couples laughingly suggests that if

Chen were to get down on his hands and knees and crawl, he would put him on a lead

and take him into the park. At this point, Chen explodes in rage, beats up the Japanese

men, jumps in the air, kicks the sign from the wall and, in the same leap, kicks the

flying sign again and obliterates it. As he lands, the attendant whistles for the police,

and a crowd of Chinese passers-by bustle him away to safety.

The second scene that presides over this paper is Lee in a memorable scene at the end

of his last complete film: namely, the mirror scene in Enter the Dragon (Clouse 1973).

This is the scene in which Lee has pursued the antihero, Han, into a secret room,

which is essentially a hall of mirrors. Lee does not know his way around this hall of

mirrors and is initially confused and disorientated by the shifting play of reflections.

This allows Han to lash out at Lee with his bladed prosthetic hand. Lee eventually

solves the problem by smashing the mirrors, so he can discern the difference between

image and reality more clearly.

What Followed

These images preside over what follows in this paper, not least because – in a sense that

is entirely appropriate – they presided over a great deal of what followed after Bruce

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Lee. The Chen Zhen of Fist of Fury was received by audiences as a kind of Chinese

cultural nationalist hero – or, to borrow the term used by Yuen-Wo Ping when

accepting his Academy Award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – someone or

something ‘for Chinese everywhere’ (Eperjesi 2004: 26). But Bruce Lee was not just for

Chinese everywhere. He became a cult hero for anti-racist, anti-colonial and post-colonial

struggles in very many quarters – including, according to Vijay Prashad, those struggling

against British colonialism in India (Prashad 2001).

In his Hong Kong martial arts films of 1971-2, Lee smashes individual oppressors, and

individual signs, if not the entire system, which still ultimately wins. In his last

complete film, the Hong Kong and Hollywood co-production, Enter the Dragon – which

was conceived and executed with a US audience firmly in mind – Lee finds himself lost

in a hall of mirrors, with his opponent lashing out at him, unpredictably. In this film,

Lee’s solution is to smash the mirrors. One early cut of the film includes an aural

flashback in this ‘mirror scene’, in which Lee hears his Shaolin sifu (or, in this film,

shifu) telling him to ‘destroy the image’ in order to ‘destroy the illusion’. This cut, with

this rather unfortunate voice-over, was itself subsequently cut from most later versions

of the film. But, in the wake of this Hong Kong-US blockbuster, Lee was received in

Western contexts as the Asian-American innovator who smashed the rules, broke out

of the box, and changed the game.

Whether he actually destroyed or even damaged any system of mirrors, images or signs

is another matter. But he certainly engaged with them, and his films consistently call

out or at least inspire debate about the many themes that they raise: nation, cultural

value, identity, desire, power, prejudice, agency, orientalism, colonialism, the gaze,

signs, the culture of the image, and more. Bruce Lee’s texts, images, narratives and

symbols raise many questions – and accordingly many have been asked many times

over. I have looked at some of them myself, in my books and articles on Bruce Lee’s

impact on film, martial arts and popular culture. However, I’m not aware of the

question I posed in my title having been asked too often.

Questioning Lee

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My title question is: ‘Was Bruce Lee Chinese, or American, or British, or What?’ I have

deliberately formulated my title as a question, and in these terms, for a number of

reasons. Chiefly, I have done it because it is deceptive, even though its wording follows a

very familiar and recognizable form: I think we might all recognise this kind of

question, and have probably posed similar questions ourselves (if only to ourselves),

more than once, asking or wondering things like ‘Is so-and-so American or Canadian,

or what?’ or ‘Is he-or-she Chinese or Japanese or what?’, and so on. Choose your own

examples. There are many.

However, while there is a lot that we could ask and say about such formulations, my

interest in them here does not boil down to enquiring into matters of cultural literacy,

ethnic stereotyping, or any of the issues that people seem to want to pounce on, such as

what it means when certain individuals, groups or peoples are not able to distinguish

between certain other racial or ethnic groups, peoples, types, cultures, and so on.

Obviously, I think we would all prefer to have a one hundred percent success rate

whenever we ask someone ‘Are you X?’, and we would prefer to avoid showing our

ignorance by posing a question that actually highlights it, like ‘Are you X or Y or Z?’

But, by the same token, I see no reason to be offended or to draw harsh conclusions if

someone from the other side of the world asks me whether I’m English, Scottish,

Welsh or Irish (or indeed, as has also happened, French). I do raise my eyebrows if

someone from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland can’t tell, however. Moreover,

coming from Newcastle, I am of course mortally offended if anyone from the UK or

Ireland asks whether I’m from Sunderland.

Many of you may wonder why. Many of you may not even have heard of Sunderland.

Or Newcastle. And this is precisely my point. For all examples of this kind only make

sense to those who are positioned in particular local or regional ways in relation to

particular local or regional issues. So, in the end, at least here and now, I am about as

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concerned with such ‘issues’ as Chinese actors playing Japanese characters in

Hollywood films as I am with ‘issues’ like Australian or South African actors playing

British characters in Hong Kong films. (I have often wondered whether people who get

either genuinely or mock-offended by cases involving the conflation of Asian cultures in

Western film and popular culture have ever even seen a Hong Kong martial arts film,

or have any inkling of the way they caricature Westerners. Maybe they have. Maybe it’s

different. I’m sure it is.) But, the point is: none of this is directly related to my interest

in the form of the question as I have posed it here.

My interest in this kind of question (‘Was Bruce Lee Chinese, or American, or British,

or What?’) boils down to the fact that its structure feels very familiar. We often use

formulations like it; and I would suggest that our thinking is accordingly orientated by

the form of the questions we set ourselves. This is not just because the form of a

question sets us off in a particular direction. It is also because this kind of familiar

question smuggles a lot of baggage with it, a lot of accepted values. These kinds of

thinking are, to borrow Hegel’s words, ‘familiarly known’. And, as Hegel argued,

precisely because something is familiarly known it is not ‘properly known’. To Hegel’s

mind, familiarity with something allows the ‘commonest form of self-deception’ (Hegel

1910/2005: 92). We don’t really know it; we just passively accept it. So, whether we are

philosophers like Hegel or not, as critical scholars and intellectuals, it seems incumbent

upon us to unpack such questions before answering them, and examine what they

presuppose, and what they would have us go along with, or how and where they would

lead us.

Perhaps what all questions presuppose is that we recognise what they are asking. In my

title question, in the most recognisable sense, what is being asked is a question about

nationality. What the question presupposes, then, is our immersion in a discourse of

nation and nationality. It presupposes the obviousness of someone having a nationality

and being a national subject. Indeed, like many questions and much thinking about

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identity, it seeks to place, and to do so by putting nationality front and centre, and

placing a subject so designated in its proper place (Rancière 1999; Chow 2002). In this

sense, my title’s question is a thoroughly modern question, in that it presumes – to

echo Benedict Anderson – that everyone must have a nationality (Anderson 1991), in

much the same way that Foucault showed us we are taught to presume that everyone

must have a sexuality (Foucault 1978).

Of course, in these waters, ‘having’ very quickly slides into ‘being’ (as Foucault and

Derrida and many others tried to warn us). Rey Chow has called the pressures that arise

in response to presumptions about nationality and ethnicity ‘coercive mimeticism’, and

has argued, following Etienne Balibar, that ethnonationalist designations serve the

biopolitical purpose of ‘keeping [certain groups] in their place’ (Chow 2002).

The ‘place’ where such types ought to be kept varies from ‘at a lower status’ to ‘well

away from us’. For, once we have decided that someone ‘is’ something – once we have

distinguished and discriminated and decided and designated and said ‘yes, so-and-so is

American’ or ‘actually, so-and-so is Chinese’ – then one or more process of othering has

already begun. Someone that starts out as he or she – a person – with what Spivak once

called all the complexities of self-hood (Spivak 1993), can very easily start to turn into a

thing, a ‘what’: at best a simplified subject; at worst, less than human, other than

human; one of them, one of those types or sorts or things, over there. This can happen

in of all kinds of discourses, from the most dehumanising data- or statistic-driven

discourse, for instance, to even the most intimate of ethnographic documentaries. We

must always be vigilant in the face of what Deleuze once called ‘the micro-fascism of

everyday life’, or what even Žižek called the ‘obscene calculus’ of attributing values to

different kinds of lives. Different discourses make some bodies matter more and other

bodies matter less.

This may sound hyperbolic, in this context. And at this stage and in this context,

perhaps it is. Yet Derrida once argued in favour of a hyperbolic attitude in scholarship

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and analysis, calling deconstruction both a ‘hyperanalyticism’ and (accordingly) a

‘hyperdiabolicism’ (Derrida 1998: 29): interminably worried about the possible

diabolical character of a monstrous future that could come if not warded off in the

present by a vigilant hyperbolical ethical attention to detail. Even if we won’t go all the

way with Derrida, there is a clear sense in which, because attention to detail always

magnifies that detail, he would seem to be justified in regarding hyperbole as strangely

proper to responsible scholarship: you have to pay attention; and paying attention

always seems to involve magnifying or hyperbolizing details.

To return to our detail, then: If we decide Bruce Lee was Chinese, or if we decide

Bruce Lee was American, then this in turn decides a lot about how we may

subsequently treat him in thought and discourse. This is because of the hold that

nation-thinking – thinking in terms of and with inexorable and often ultimate

reference to nation – has on us.

One of the strengths of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the extent to

which he shows the hold of nation-thinking on us (Anderson 1991). It seems almost

impossible to escape from nation-thinking, Anderson suggests. Nation-thinking often

becomes the mainstay of our thought-processes around certain subjects. Even our own

innermost thoughts on certain subjects seem sometimes to be working for this or that

nationalist agenda.

So the form of any such question should catch our attention. But also the content. I

chose this particular content (‘Was Bruce Lee Chinese, or American, or British, or

What?’) because – even after having read and thought and written so much (perhaps

too much) about Bruce Lee – it still seemed provocative, to me at least. For, I’ve never

heard anyone else ask whether Bruce Lee was British. And, once this idea had occurred

to me, I actually had to go off and do a little bit of new research, and learn some new

things about the once ‘British Crown Colony’ of Hong Kong. And, in fact, it turns out

that Lee could perhaps quite easily have become British – or more British.

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So what was he? Was he Chinese? Ethnically, perhaps. More or less. Yet, wasn’t he

American?

He was born in San Francisco, but he returned to Hong Kong as a baby, where he lived

until he was eighteen.

And Hong Kong was a British Crown Colony. So, was he, in fact, British? In a sense,

during his early life in Hong Kong, he almost was, or could have been: as a

Commonwealth citizen, he could have gone on to become almost fully British.

However, instead of this, as is relatively well known (although for reasons that remain

shrouded in myth), when he was eighteen, Lee took up an opportunity to claim

American citizenship: at the time, the US was offering the opportunity to claim US

citizenship to anyone born on US soil, as long as they were prepared to sign up for

military service. Bruce Lee did this, but failed the military medical.

From this point on, until his premature death in 1973, Lee spent a long period living

first in the US and then in Hong Kong. After college, he began his TV and film career

in the US but moved back to Hong Kong because he could not seem to break through

to leading roles in America at the very moment that audiences and producers were

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clamouring for him in Hong Kong – thanks to is role in the TV series The Green Hornet

(1966).

So, there is no mystery or controversy about the US passport that Lee held from the age

of eighteen. But is a passport or ID card the start or the end of the matter of the

questions my title poses? Discourses of identity often slide freely between registers of

having and evocations of being. And, in large part because of the kinds of images

associated with Bruce Lee, like those with which I began, Bruce Lee’s ‘identity’ is

claimed, and placed, and positioned, in a few key ways. These claims on Bruce Lee’s

identity are multiple and often contradictory. And they can often be regarded as the

staking of a claim in and a claim on ‘Bruce Lee’. In this sense, claims about and

positionings of Bruce Lee are often kinds of ownership claims. Equally, they are bound

up in the narratives and affective structures of the identity-constructions of those

making those claims. So, which one is right? Or, stated bluntly: who owns Bruce Lee?

Where on any of the many maps and hierarchies that we rely on to make sense of

people, processes, things and phenomena in the world (including ourselves) are we to

place him? To whom do we give him?

Does China own him? Bruce Lee is after all ethnically Chinese and his first language was

Cantonese. But he was born in San Francisco, raised in the British Crown Colony of

Hong Kong, and became a US citizen at eighteen.

Britain, then? Stories about his early life actually often refer to some much-mythologised

anecdotes that seem designed to illustrate his colonial resentment and anger at the

British colonizers of Hong Kong. So there is some evidence that he resented British

colonial control in Hong Kong. Moreover, the key themes in his first three martial arts

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action films are heavily anti-imperialist and pro-Chinese. So, in this sense, Lee made a

strong albeit romantic and imaginary phantasmatic identification with Chineseness –

both in his films and in his various writings. But does romanticizing China make you

Chinese? What makes you Chinese? Ethnicity? There is certainly a strong strain of

Chinese ethnonationalism in the imagery of Bruce Lee films. However, as is well

known (at least by those who know a lot about Lee), in his own writings, personal

outlook, and indeed in his orientation towards martial arts research and teaching, as

well as in the storyline of his final, unfinished film, Game of Death, Lee seemed to be

deliberately and self-consciously against ethnonationalism, and for a kind of liberal

individualist multiculturalism.

Diagram of the pagoda in Game of Death.

The pinnacle of the ascent through (cultural) levels leads to ‘no style’

So, what about America? Despite this being both his country of birth and his citizenship

of choice as an adult, Lee is still widely apprehended in America, and elsewhere, in

terms of his ethnicity, and widely believed to be Chinese, rather than American. In

2015 – 42 years after his death – the Emmy Award winning American PBS TV series

‘American Masters’ undertook work on a documentary to tell the apparently little

known and evidently novel-enough story of Bruce Lee as being an American master. Not

Chinese – American. Such a story strikes me as only worth telling (or making a

programme about) in an environment that is still dominated by the associations that

make every ethnically Chinese man a ‘Chinaman’.

Of course, to quote from The Big Lebowski, ‘the preferred nomenclature’ in the US is

Asian-American. And as many scholars have observed, the hyphenated form of

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American identities (Asian-American, Afro-American, etc.) is an attempt to stabilise and

control the flow of antagonisms and contradictions within the discourse of what it is to

‘be’ American (Chow 2002; Marchetti 2006; Bowman 2013). But the graft doesn’t

always work; and sometimes, even forty years after the death of the man who both

substantially introduced and brought martial arts most vividly to life on American

cinema and TV screens, his beloved fans and an interested wider public still for some

reason ‘need’ to be informed about the place of his birth and the choice of his

citizenship.

What about Hong Kong? The in-between-ness of Lee’s cultural and national identity

seems to reflect or replay, as phylogeny to ontogeny, the in-between status of Hong

Kong, as it was ever-more theorised by film and cultural studies scholars increasingly

through the 1990s. Bruce Lee’s biographical narrative, shifting movements and shifting

identifications seem uncannily apposite against the backdrop of the postmodern and

postcolonial claims made about Hong Kong in so much scholarship (see for instance

Abbas 1997; Bordwell 2000; Chow 1998; Lo 2005; Morris 2004; Teo 2008).

The multiple, moving, migrant status is not unique to Bruce Lee, of course. But

perhaps it is because of the plethora of cultural and national positions that Bruce Lee

can be said to occupy or straddle that there seems to be so many strong drives to ‘place’

him or ‘claim’ him: whether for a place (America, Hong Kong, China, or, indeed, the

world), or a people (Americans, ‘Chinese everywhere’, the colonised subaltern, this or

that ethnic minority), or a martial arts style (Wing Chun Kung Fu, Jeet Kune Do,

‘American Freestyle Karate’, even MMA), or an ideology (‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, ‘New

Age’, ‘Postmodern’, ‘multicultural’).

What is the status of these claims, placements or emplacements? The flipside of placing

Bruce Lee is following him. As I have suggested, these two aspects often arise

reciprocally. And the way Lee is placed, or where he is placed, how he is placed, what he

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is placed as, determines what it is that his followers believe they are following. And

Bruce Lee has many followers – many kinds of followers. From the moment of his

entrance on the silver screen, Bruce Lee became a cult figure, a cult icon, a cult hero.

And there have been many cults. The two images I used as my epigraphs suggest their

range – from Chinese nationalist hero to globe-trotting shatterer of images and

illusions.

To stick with the ‘Chinese connection’, film scholars have written a fair amount about

the way Lee was read and received in Hong Kong and East Asia (Teo 2008, 2009; Lo

2005). In these readings, Bruce Lee becomes a metaphor and metonym of Hong Kong

itself; Chen Zhen’s struggles are Hong Kong’s struggles; Hong Kong’s struggles are

China’s struggles; Chen Zhen stands as China, Bruce Lee as Hong Kong; in forward

and backward associations, allusions and connotations, in a fluid flow of connections.

This affective overdetermination is surely a large part of Lee’s enduring significance –

that is to say, at least part of the reason why, although many martial arts actors come

and go, Bruce Lee remains revered.

But it is not just the overdetermination of his time and place, of course: his sheer

physical presence is the alchemical force, the Rosetta Stone, which accounts for his

transcultural success.

These two dimensions: the symbolic and overdetermined structures of feeling and

affect, combined with Bruce Lee’s physical presence and choreographic genius, are

doubtless what enable his inexhaustible cultural translatability, from one context to

another, one time to another. It is certainly why, according to Vijay Prashad, Bruce Lee

instantly became an icon in places as diverse as India and Africa: an appealing agent of

anti-colonial struggle (Prashad 2001). In this cult, Bruce Lee’s Chineseness or Hong

Kong-ness matters considerably less than his fists and his fury. He’s clearly ‘one of us’

because he’s clearly not ‘one of them’. And, crucially, the thing that’s even more

pertinent: he’s not afraid. He’s the underdog, but he’s not afraid. And when he fights,

he wins. As such, Lee’s appeal stretches out and snares any underdog – not just the

colonised, but anyone under threat from any oppressive bully. Bruce Lee can be the

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hero of anyone who is bullied. So, at the same time as the allegory, there is a literality to

it. Bruce Lee shows the way. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, but literally,

pragmatically: Bruce Lee provides master-class after master-class in how to beat (up) the

big bully.

This is why in the wake of Bruce Lee, in the light of Bruce Lee, more and more people

the world over flocked to martial arts classes – to learn to be like Bruce Lee. But Bruce

Lee is not just the kung fu king who kicked the colonial sign to pieces. He is also the

Asian-American who punched the mirror, and destroyed the image. This Bruce Lee is

also the Bruce Lee who drove people away from ‘traditional’ martial arts, by urging

them to free their minds and their bodies from convention and institution (Miller

2000; Bowman 2010).

Or What

In this sense, Bruce Lee is a ‘what’: a thing – but a different kind of thing to a ‘some-

one’ who is made into a ‘some-thing’ by processes of othering, which are simplifying,

reductive and dehumanising.

In many of the designations and interpretations of Bruce Lee, his thingness has only

positive ramifications, no matter how problematic they may also be.

In a 2012 documentary, called I Am Bruce Lee, for instance, both Kobe Bryant and

MMA fighter Stephan Bonnar affirm that they ‘never thought of Bruce Lee as Asian’ –

they just thought of him as an idol (McCormack 2012). These kinds of statements raise

the hackles of many involved in ethnicity and identity studies, even though they are

attestations of the most profound respect. The problem with them is that whilst they try

to erase race, ethnicity or nationalism, or to say that someone or something transcends

race, ethnicity or nationalism, they do so by instituting both a binary and a hierarchy.

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To ‘not even think of someone as Asian’ means to release them from a category and a

hierarchy that otherwise remains intact and implicitly fully operative. The ideal other is

differentiated from an inferior other. Bruce Lee exists as a kind of state of exception.

So, whilst a key part of the early appeal of Bruce Lee for non-whites the world over in

the 1970s boiled down to what Bill Brown called his ‘generic ethnicity’ (Brown 1997:

33), which facilitated his becoming a point of identification for non-whites; the flipside

of this has been pointed out by Sylvia Huey Chong, who notes that Bruce Lee can

always ‘serve both as a metonym for the Chinese as a racialized group and also as an

honorary white, a figure of masculine power who transcends his racialized status and is

assimilated into existing structures of power’ (Chong 2012: loc 3163).

In fact, in her discussion of the discursive plight of Asians in Vietnam era America,

Chong goes further, arguing that:

as a racialized hero Lee may be more an object of mimetic desire than simply a figure

of identification. If the Chinese ‘loved America loving’ Lee, this desire is

triangulated between a Chinese viewing subject, an American viewing subject, and

Lee. By recognizing himself in Lee, a male Chinese subject imagined how he himself

might also be ‘loved’ by America. This heteroracial triangle centered on Lee rests

upon a disavowal of racial difference as well as of homoerotic desire. (Chong 2012:

loc 3163)

Chong’s reading of ‘the oriental obscene’ in 1960s and 70s America is complex, and I

have neither time nor space to do justice to any of it here. But hopefully it already helps

to show the way that many issues that we might want to keep separate – ‘Western’

orientalism, say, versus ‘diasporic’ consciousness – are intertwined and entangled in

ways that make their disambiguation impossible. These entanglements traverse race,

ethnicity, nation, class and sexuality.

But what it is that traverses? What is it that is entangled, that people want to try to

place, to invest in or divest themselves of; to meld with or separate from? The answer is:

things: images, texts, products, constructs, tropes, narratives, merging with structures of

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fantasy and desire, social and pedagogical relations, practices. To borrow and combine

phrases once borrowed and combined by Rey Chow: cultural translation (or, in other

words, transformation) takes place ‘by way of mass commodities’ (Chow 2007).

In terms of the international circulation of things, Bruce Lee has always been a ‘what’; a

partial, incomplete, hybrid object; intervening into and affecting context after context.

The ontology implied here is deconstructive and Benjaminian in the sense developed

by Rey Chow in her work on cultural translation (Chow 1995). ‘Bruce Lee’ is always

ultimately only ever a collection of objects, images, words, texts, sounds, practices,

ideas, fantasies and interpretations, that cross untold numbers of literal and

metaphorical borders the world over every day. These part-objects are grafted into part-

processes that incessantly take part in and depart from all sorts of discourses and

identities, from the most trivial to the most serious.

As such, the answer to the question of my title seems to be that Bruce Lee is Chinese

and American and British and What, in the sense that the logic of ‘either/or’ does not

seem relevant in a world in which things can so easily and so often be apprehended as

‘both/and’ (Royle 2000). However, if we follow the logic of this algebra a little bit

further, then Bruce Lee is equally neither Chinese nor American nor British – although

he will always be a ‘what’ – a thing, a textual element, a figure in the carpet, a

supplement, a trace in the texture of the partition of the sensible and perceptible, an

allusion, a spectre – a boss, a fist, a connection, a dragon, a fury. You name it.

In light of this thingness before nationalism, this openness to interpretation and

incorporation, I would hope that cultural analysts might move to interrogate the

question of what subtends and organises any appropriative impulse, any act of placing

or emplacement, in fuller awareness of the ways in which ‘placing’ cannot be divorced

from ‘policing’ (Barthes 1977; Rancière 1999).

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Films

Clouse,Robert.1973.EntertheDragon.Action,Crime,Drama.Lo,Wei.1972.FistofFury(JīngWǔMén).McCormack,Pete.2012.IAmBruceLee.Documentary,Biography.TheGreenHornet.1966.

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