A Bruised Legend: Hong Kong’s Cold War Coloniality Embodied

In contrast to the much hailed Bruce Lee persona as a heroic and individualised legend, this article reconsiders Bruce Lee’s body of work including his working body as a ‘third world allegory’ in an era of multinational capitalism. I centralise the place of ‘experience’ in the characterisation of Bruce Lee as an auteur in ‘writing’ his body and films as literary texts, and frame Hong Kong coloniality as central to that experience. Re-connecting the well-known narratives of Bruce Lee’s not-so-successful Hollywood experience and his later pan-Asian bombastic comeback to his troubled ethnicity and to his coming-of-age participation in the socially-conscious post-war Cantonese cinema, this paper rehistoricises the tale of Lee as a struggling case of colonial subject formation, towards a decolonial understanding of 1950s–1970s Hong Kong fuelled by class, gender, inter-ethnic, Cold War contradictions and violence. It remaps the ways in which Bruce Lee painstakingly works his internalised Hong Kong British desires into an American Dream through translating his over-extended body into a diaspora-informed, hyper-masculine Kungfu language, speaking not only to a globalised empowerment of marginal youths but also to a specifically colonised third world angst.