Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries

Paul Bowman

Eph 2015 · Rowman & Littlefield

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The phrase “martial arts studies” is increasingly circulating as a term to describe a new field of interest. But many academic fields including history, philosophy, anthropology, and Area studies already engage with martial arts in their own particular way. Therefore, is there really such a thing as a unique field of martial arts studies?

Martial Arts Studies is the first book to engage directly with these questions. It assesses the multiplicity and heterogeneity of possible approaches to martial arts studies, exploring orientations and limitations of existing approaches. It makes a case for constructing the field of martial arts studies in terms of key coordinates from post-structuralism, cultural studies, media studies, and post-colonialism.

By using these anti-disciplinary approaches to disrupt the approaches of other disciplines, Martial Arts Studies proposes a field that both emerges out of and differs from its many disciplinary locations.

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Paul Bowman is director of postgraduate research studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the founding editor of JOMEC Journal; founder of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research; director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Politics Research Group and co-director of the Reconstructing Multiculturalism Research Network.

He has edited multiple issues of the journal Parallax, plus issues of the journals Postcolonial Studies, Social Semiotics and Educational Philosophy and Theory, as well as regular issues of JOMEC Journal. In addition, he has edited several books: Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), The Truth of Žižek (2006), The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2011) and Rancière and Film (2013). He has also authored many academic monographs: Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Culture and the Media (2012), Beyond Bruce Lee (2013) and Reading Rey Chow (2013). His work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. He is on the editorial board of Culture Machine, Global Discourse, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, The Poster, and Ctrl-Z: New/Media/Philosophy.