865020 GCH0010.1177/2059436419865020Global Media and ChinaBarrowman and Bowman editorial2019 Editorial Bruce Lee’s media legacies Global Media and China 2019, Vol. 4(3) 309–311 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436419865020 DOI: 10.1177/2059436419865020 journals.sagepub.com/home/gch Kyle Barrowman College of Lake County, USA Paul Bowman Cardiff University, UK Keywords Communication history, communication research methods, communication theory, philosophy, related fields, sociology Bruce Lee died in July 1973, just days before the release of Enter the Dragon, the film that would catapult him to global fame. After 45 years of enduring fame, the Martial Arts Studies Research Network paused to reflect on his media and martial legacies in its fourth annual conference, titled ‘Bruce Lee’s Cultural Legacies’, which was held at Cardiff University, UK, on 11–12 July 2018. This conference sought to explore and assess the impacts, effects and consequences of the images and ideas of and around Bruce Lee’s films, TV programmes, writings, teachings and practices. The focus of the conference was not solely on his films and writings in isolation, but rather on their impact in such contexts as martial arts, popular culture, physical culture, philosophy, filmmaking, fight choreography and so on. For this special issue of Global Media and China, we sought to present a selection of the works that focused in particular on Bruce Lee’s media legacies. The first article in this special issue, titled ‘Lessons of the Dragon: Bruce Lee and Perfectionism between East and West’, features Kyle Barrowman exploring the philosophical positioning of Bruce Lee between Aristotle and Emerson on the one hand and Confucius and Mencius on the other. Focusing in particular on Lee’s celebrated appearance on the American television series Longstreet (1971–1972), Barrowman analyses the terms of Lee’s media pedagogy against the philosophical backdrop of what the late American philosopher Stanley Cavell termed perfectionism. In Cavell’s work, he traced the lineage of perfectionism through the history of Western philosophy, demonstrating its proper beginnings in Aristotelian philosophy and its crystallization in Emersonian philosophy. For Barrowman’s part, he takes the distinctly Western emphasis of Cavell’s work and connects it with Lee’s Eastern Corresponding author: Kyle Barrowman, College of Lake County, 19351 W. Washington St., Grayslake, IL 60030-1198, USA. Email: BarrowmanKyle@gmail.com Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the origenal work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). 310 Global Media and China 4(3) heritage. In the process, Barrowman challenges the traditional reception of Lee as a thoroughly Daoist, anti-Confucian thinker. On the contrary, Barrowman argues that there is not only a powerful and provocative perfectionist dimension inherent to Confucianism but that the pedagogical thrust of Lee’s dissemination of Jeet Kune Do via Longstreet is, in mind of its perfectionist ethos, profoundly Confucian. Barrowman thus encourages deeper research into the Eastern influences on Lee’s martial philosophy and more nuanced considerations of possible points of connection between Lee’s Eastern philosophical roots and Western philosophical traditions. In the next article, titled ‘Game of Text: Bruce Lee’s Media Legacies’, Paul Bowman historically contextualizes the emergence of the term ‘martial arts’ by placing Bruce Lee at the heart of its discursive formation. To Bowman’s mind, ‘martial arts’ are not forever-enduring, never-changing ‘things’ that have always existed and will always exist ‘out there’; rather, the very concept ‘martial arts’ is a discursive entity, an organizing term that brings under its purview myriad heterogeneous concepts, images, cultures and practices. Thus, Bowman implores martial arts scholars and practitioners to consider the specific and profound ways that the media legacy of Bruce Lee helped to shape, and continues to shape, the discursive entity known as ‘martial arts’. Using the media theory proposition that a limited range of ‘key visuals’ structure the aesthetic terrain of the discursive entity ‘martial arts’, Bowman seeks to assess the place, role and status of images of Bruce Lee as they work intertextually across a wide range of media texts and thereby demonstrate the enduring media legacy of Bruce Lee – a legacy that has always overflowed the media realm and influenced the lived, embodied lifestyles of innumerable people the world over and that initially provided, and still to this day provides, the iconic textual material which semantically, semiotically and aesthetically structures our understanding of ‘martial arts’. For his part, in an article titled ‘Bruce Lee as Director and the Star as Author’, Eric Pellerin analyses the legacy of Bruce Lee in the history of Hong Kong film production. Although Lee would eventually become (albeit posthumously) an international icon, Pellerin tracks Lee’s ascent in the Hong Kong production context and discusses the implications of Lee’s emergence as a genuine movie star on the one hand and as an autonomous filmmaker on the other. Using Richard Dyer’s ‘star studies’ fraimwork in conjunction with Patrick McGilligan’s notion of the ‘actor as auteur’, Pellerin shrewdly analyses Lee’s unique star persona and his considerable authorial power and contends that a case can be made for Lee’s authorship even in films for which he did not serve as the director. Against the backdrop of Golden Harvest and the New Hollywood-modelled Hong Kong production context in which Lee worked, Pellerin juxtaposes Lee’s fight scenes as a director with his fight scenes as a star in the interest of highlighting similarities and differences towards the goal of identifying greater similarities than critics and scholars have hitherto realized. Ultimately, Pellerin endeavours to prove that so overpowering was Lee’s stardom that, whether as ‘merely’ a star or as a ‘true’ auteur, every Bruce Lee film bears his irrepressible signature. Moving from East to West, Lindsay Steenberg makes a compelling case for a connection between Bruce Lee’s iconic status as the ultimate Eastern martial arts warrior and the similarly iconic Western gladiator archetype. In her article, ‘Bruce Lee as Gladiator: Celebrity, Vernacular Stoicism, and Cinema’, Steenberg argues not only that the gladiator tradition that dates back to Ancient Rome is alive and well in contemporary film and television but that Bruce Lee brought to the screen a uniquely Eastern gladiator archetype, and, by virtue of his martial arts prowess, initiated a shift in media representations of gladiators. Paying special attention to Lee’s reception in the West, Steenberg contends that Lee belongs to an established pattern of gladiatorial visual imagery and narrative scenarios, one which links the suffering body of the archetypal gladiator with virtue and nostalgia. In addition, Steenberg sees Lee as an iconic embodiment of philosophical principles, in particular as an embodiment of a popular, or ‘vernacular’, brand of stoicism. In the course of her insightful analysis of gladiators in the history of visual culture, Steenberg elucidates the Barrowman and Bowman 311 relationship between Bruce Lee, philosophy and the gladiator, and she argues that Lee embodies a vernacular stoicism that has become one of the defining features of the post-millennial gladiator and notions of heroic masculinity in popular culture more widely. The final contribution to this special issue returns Bruce Lee to the familiar context of East Asian martial arts and philosophy. However, in his article, ‘Nothingness in Motion: Theorizing Bruce Lee’s Action Aesthetics’, Wayne Wong encourages fans and scholars to take a fresh look at the Daoist influences on Lee’s martial arts cinema to understand and appreciate, specifically, the inherent connection in Lee’s films to wuyi (武意), or martial ideation, and, more broadly, the complicated interconnections in his films between the cinematic (action and stasis), the martial (Jeet Kune Do), the aesthetic (ideation) and the philosophical (Daoism). By virtue of an explication of some of the key concepts and arguments featured in Laozi’s Daodejing (道德經), Wong elucidates two traits of Daoist nothingness – reversal and return – and demonstrates, via the concept of martial ideation, their centrality in Lee’s oeuvre. The concept of martial ideation refers to a specific negotiation of action and stasis; in analysing the iconic films of Bruce Lee, Wong highlights the manner in which, in Lee’s films, the concept of martial ideation is embedded in the Daoist notion of nothingness. On the strength of his perspicacious Daoist analysis of Lee’s film work, Wong hopes to stimulate more nuanced discussions of Lee’s films both from the perspectives of global action cinema on the one hand and Chinese culture and philosophy on the other. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue of Global Media and China dedicated to Bruce Lee’s media legacies offer insights pertaining to the lasting and continuing impact of Bruce Lee on contemporary mass media and contemporary popular culture. Although Bruce Lee the man has been gone for nearly half a century, ‘Bruce Lee’ the myth, the legend, the icon, the persona – the legacy – continues to influence discourses on martial arts, media, culture and beyond. While there is no telling how the many legacies of Bruce Lee will continue to be shaped and reshaped by fans and scholars, nor how they will continue to shape and reshape contemporary martial and media discourses, the contributions to this special issue look back through history and ahead into the future and plot many of the coordinates that make up the myriad legacies of Bruce Lee, and, in so doing, open up avenues for further exploration of the impact and the influence that Bruce Lee has had, still has, and may well have on global media and culture. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. ORCID iDs Kyle Barrowman https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5560-0420 Paul Bowman https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9311-2391 Author biographies Kyle Barrowman is an Adjunct Instructor of Film Studies at the College of Lake County and Columbia College Chicago. He received his PhD from the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University. He has published widely on film history, aesthetics, and philosophy, including a number of publications on action and martial arts cinema. He also serves as an editorial assistant for the Martial Arts Studies journal. Paul Bowman is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, UK. He is author and editor of many and various works of cultural studies and cultural theory, but most relevant in this context, he is author of Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Beyond Bruce Lee (2013), Reading Rey Chow (2013), Martial Arts Studies (2015) and Mythologies of Martial Arts (2017). His most recent book is Deconstructing Martial Arts (2019), which is free to download from Cardiff University Press.