Author: Anthony

In this article I am acknowledging Bruce Lee’s influence on Black popular culture through Chinese martial arts & Culture as well as Western film by exploring his journey in becoming the symbol of liberation for ethnic pride and justice that he personifies so dynamically on film. I highlight key moments in his career that distinguish his perspective as well as the philosophies that design his morale. Also, by balancing his actions with historic features of the African American experience I unify them to demonstrate their reciprocity. https://medium.com/p/6a46529a390e

“Much of his social life revolved around trading them, and he learned about exchange, fairness, trust, the importance of processes as opposed to results, what it means to get cheated, taken advantage of, even robbed. Baseball cards were the medium of his economic life too. Nowhere better to learn the power and arbitrariness of money, the absolute divorce between use value and exchange value, notions of long- and short-term investment, the possibility of personal values that are independent of market values.” – M.P

There is benefit in addressing the fact that borders exist. We cannot run from situations that bring up these contact zones in fear of an igniting a controversy. “Retreating to our respective corners” would be doing the country a disservice.  While we cannot silence our differences, we also cannot allow controversy to evoke hatred. Obama notes that it was not the Reverend’s remarks that made the campaign take a “divisive turn” but our reaction to the remarks. – A.G

Project Reading

Bibliographic

Ongiri, Amy Abugo. “”He wanted to be just like Bruce Lee”: African Americans, Kung Fu Theater and Cultural Exchange at the Margins.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 5 no. 1, 2002, p. 31-40. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jaas.2002.0009.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/14656

About the author

Amy Abugo Ongiri is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Her research and teaching focuses on Black literature and culture, transnational cinema, and gender and sexuality studies. During the academic year 2001-2002 she was a fellow at the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. Her current book project Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Articulations of the Black Power Movement and the Search to Define a Black Aesthetic addresses the cultural and political articulations of the Black Power movement, particularly the aesthetic concerns of the Black Arts Movement’s search to define a “Black Aesthetic.” This essay is part of a larger project addressing the transnational circulation of Black popular culture.

Role

I hope that this piece will provide me with beneficial insight into the systems and concepts that allowed Bruce Lee’s films to stitch seamlessly into Western culture during the 1970’s. I should use this article to support Lee’s very own contact zones then explain why they were so important in building the bridge between the east and the west as far as film and martial arts go.

Appeal

This piece should provoke your interests in world culture it helps demonstrate how we are always connected even if we live on separate halves of the Earth. If you are fascinated by film and the history of film this article should give you a very raw and astute summary of what the culture of film was like in the 1970’s. If you are interested in martial arts, Bruce Lee was one of the best to ever do it.

This article reminds me of Ta’Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me because it draws from many complex issues that are or have been occurring within the past decade as far as social justice inc concerned. One thing that Heller notes as important are the recollection of times this up and coming wave of professionals have encountered. The kind of country that this particular age group has developed in he says has a high activist agenda. The groups of young woman and men we are watching take office now have been raised during tense times and have sharp conservative perspectives because of them. Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter addressing his young son to warn him of all the trouble this country has and will cause to a young Black man trying to make a name for himself. This seems similar to many First-Gen, minority, low-income, or underrepresented students around the country who are coerced into these university systems but still constantly have to bare the pressure of all of the other larger systems that we find ourselves belonging to because of our social status. As we step further and further into our adulthood and closer to the practices that elicit opportunity we are understanding that unfortunately the structures that rule the ‘real world’ remain unchanged, they just transpire on a more discrete level. Older generations might mark us as oversensitive yet we see it as a fight that we did not choose to take part in. Within the generation that is currently blossoming are various new identities and ideals that are unconcerned about the feuds and tensions of the past, it is frustrating to have to continue cleaning up when we do not feel associated with these evils. We are much more concerned with innovation and creation especially while we have all kinds of readily available technology and networks that were unavailable before.

As far as a sponsor goes there can be many. As far as sponsors go they can be many things, I believe a sponsor can bring the best out of an individual without the most effective attempt. The effects a sponsor might have on his/her mentee can be everlasting and in some cases create unprecedented confidence and structure. In everything we learn there must be a sponsor, everywhere we go there must be one too. I choose to write this response in a reflective tone, how must we continue life without sponsors? There must always be those willing to teach and give their path of fortune onto the next willing generation if not nothing would survive. Sponsors have done so much for literacy. Without it, none of the slaves would have never learned to read or write, left to their own devices one could have only gone so far. I vouch for sponsorship when I think back to some times where I may have never known myself had it been for a sponsor. I think back to a time during my teenage years when I boxed and tried for the Golden gloves medal, my sponsor educated me as to its history, etiquette, process, etc… and without this knowledge I would have failed undoubtedly. There are few things we can accomplish blindly in this world, this must be the reason why we watch one another so closely.

The “scholarship boy” “abstracting from immediate experience” as an attempt to reformat or understand his drastically different life within the classroom and household is something that I feel I have noticed not only within myself but as Rodriguez mentions within the rare scholarship children whose ambition gleams from their eyes and dwindles their confidence.

What I took from The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning “Basics” was that there is a space in which some children might stumble upon, especially those of working class/minority families, where they must decide, at a relatively young age, what is most important to them considering what they know they are capable of and most importantly what their environment is like.

The “scholarship boy” here aka Rodriguez became passionate about knowledge not knowing the level of intimacy academia requires or what he would have to give in order to fulfill his desires. These desires happen to fall out of line with not only his immediate family but his culture and effectively alter his experience with them. Although I have never considered myself much of a “scholarship boy” to this extent, I will say that I can relate to his feeling of guilt and withdrawal. Children generally have little conception of management or balance and wildly chase their desires unaware of the bewilderment it could cause around them. He mentions his passion separating him from other academics in college, what was once rewarded in primary and secondary school is now frowned upon as an adult because apparently no one of his background should know as much of or care as much for academia as he does which again can be confusing and frustrating. After years of struggling to find his pace yet still deepening his love for knowledge Rodriguez is finally able to describe his roller coaster with learning and accept it.

This ending is very heart-warming to me. Seeing that Rodriguez persisted among his constant reflection and dissatisfaction gives me hope that we are all able to do the same, being that we are consistent in our search and willing to fail on the way there. This excerpt makes me think of the phrase “ignorance is bliss” especially when he quotes one of his teachers who says “The importance of the praise of given the un-solitary, richly passionate life is that it simultaneously reflects the value of reflective life” I think that means – those who live more passionate lives are usually not reflecting (unlike the reflective one) they are acting in the moment and giving their truest selves and opinions within their judgments rather than allowing what they know to cloud their proposals. As for the one who is more reflective, they will only allow themselves to be as passionate as their understanding of the moment allows them to be, “Abstracting from immediate experience”

Through the perspective of a young girl of color acclimating herself to ordinary life within the systems that “organize” America, Barbara Mellix invites us to apprehend the inner controversy that regularly takes place in the minds of people who are underrepresented and ironically, misunderstood. In this excerpt she compromises the “ordinary everyday speech of “country” coloreds” to acknowledge the language gap that exists between corporate America and common folk, she also captures her experience chronologically so that we may understand the confusion one might suffer through each milestone being raised surrounded by English rules that oppose “proper” English as well as the misconceptions that occur because of this style of upbringing.

I can relate to this confusion myself, also coming from an area where “proper” English is frowned upon. I can say from experience that when you are accustomed to these “other” forms of speech from where ever and whenever you were raised it becomes difficult to see the world from the perspective of regular “proper” English users. I know that language is a way to communicate with each other what we can give and can get from our environment, therefore it is sometimes inevitable that your understanding of the world is a result of how you communicate with it. I believe it is unfair to say that one form of speech is more or less optimal than the other but,I do think it is fair to agree that it would be easier to interact with a more narrow basis of dialect and language. Either way, as convenient as it may be to ignore each other and water our differences it should not be so much to ask that we seed the common ground that is apparent in every interaction and grow to understand one another from there.