Kung Fu, Hip Hop, and Imperialism

Originally published in Nice in Theory - Issue I, July 2020

My Dad always loved American culture. I grew up with him blasting Prince and James Brown in the car before getting home, where he’d play movies like The Godfather - but also anything with Adam Sandler. He grew up during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran but held a fascination for the United States, as did most of his peers. They all loved the mainstream American culture of the 60s and 70s; Mohammed Ali and Bruce Lee posters covered their walls alongside the Eagles and Clint Eastwood. Yet during the protests that preceded the 1979 Revolution, their older peers also introduced them to Ho Chi Minh, Malcolm X and Che Guevara. Still, they were kids and couldn’t fully understand why or against whom they were mad at. All my dad’s peers agree that the months preceding the fall of the Shah were the most fun; little to no school meant more time to play football outside., Tehrani teens would shout anti-American and anti-imperial slogans in the afternoon before coming home to listen to glam rock and electro funk.

Khomeini had become a house-hold name long before the revolution. More than a simple preacher, he has been credited for reviving political Islam in the Middle East. He appeared as a sort of messianic leader who would restore tradition and order; my father recalls people giving him supernatural attributes, like appearing on the face of the moon. He found his following in Iran’s largest single group suffering from the Shah’s policies: the rural poor. Our family was lucky; as soon as Khomeini took power my father was sent to Paris with a couple of friends to live with his adult sister who was studying there. 

Decades later he met my mom, an American, in a Paris café and soon after they had me. By the time I was 11, I’d already started listening to my own music; I was a big 50 Cent and G-Unit fan boy. Just after introducing me to Biggie Smalls, my Dad shared with me one of his favorite movies: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.Ghost Dog is about a contract killer, played by Forest Whitaker, who wrestles to honor the ancient code of the Samurai, as outlined in Hagakure, also referred to as “the Book of the Samurai” in popular culture. The entire soundtrack of the movie is produced by the legendary Robert Diggs, a.k.a RZA, the mastermind behind the Wu Tang Clan.

As I delved deeper and deeper into the Wu’s lore (references, samples, narratives and stories) it became very apparent that my Dad and the RZA were into the same corny Kung Fu and Blaxploitation flicks. American movies, Bruce Lee and the Shaw Brothers fascinated generations of Iranians in need of entertainment. What was it in those movies that appealed to both my father, raised in the US-backed Shah dictatorship of Iran, and RZA, raised in the deteriorating inner cities of America?

The answer became very apparent to me after discussions with him, watching hours of grainy, poorly-dubbed martial art movies and listening to countless Wu Tang interviews and albums. The narrative of most American action movies was pretty similar: average white patriotic Joe decides to save the fabric of America against hordes of foreign commies, revolutionaries and corrupt federal government. When the movie ends, justice and truth are restored in our institutions and the rogue agent of disruption is defeated.

Kung Fu and Blaxploitation movies subvert this narrative. Instead of idealizing the power of individuals in restoring the status quo of justice, these films emphasize the power of community and mutual aid. In the Shaw Brothers’ The 36th Chamber of Shaolin the hero leads a local rebellion against the Manchu empire. In Bruce Lee’s famous Enter the Dragon he fights in a tournament alongside a forgotten Vietnam War veteran and a gambling addict, both representative of the forgotten fringes of American society.

Also, seeing a man of color kicking a white guy’s ass for once was very refreshing for the young men and women who’d been forced to see their struggles parodied and vilified on the big screen countless times. The dialogue and storylines of these movies are often described as corny, unoriginal and formulaic but I’d like to direct attention to the cultural value of this art form as a tool of moralization, and perhaps even liberation.

In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explains how colonial domination manages to utterly desecrate and erase the culture of a conquered people, ascribing to it impressions of primitivism, ignorance, and superstition. It does so by “the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.”

New laws and prohibitions introduced by an occupying regime are recurring themes in Kung Fu movies. For example, in The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin, the minority Manchu government who rule over the land with disregard for local culture, hierarchy and traditions confronts a Shaolin school and its neighboring village. In The Shaolin and the Wu Tang, warlords affiliated to the ruling Qing dynasty attempt to turn two local fighting schools against each other.In mid-20th century Iran, there certainly was a sense of Westernization in urban centers combined with a conscious state pushback against Islam as a dominant political force.

To this day we witness the disrespect and blatant disregard for Black American culture, with hip-hop described by a certain Fox News anchor as having done “more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years.” The introductions of new legal relations are also a prominent feature of colonized and racially marginalized society. In Iran, the consolidation of the Shah’s power was aided by extensive and intensive expansion, that is to say territorial extension of the capitalist mode of production into new territories and the commodification of previous social and productive relation.

Lenin ascribes eight methods that monopolistic associations use to assure market domination: stopping supplies of raw material, stopping the supply of labor, stopping deliveries, closing trade outlets, agreements with buyers, systemic price cutting, stopping credit, and boycott. The Russian revolutionary was attempting to determine how capitalism had evolved from a free market ideology to a more carefully organized capitalist system.These methods are eerily similar to the methods used by record companies to undercut the creative labor involved in the music they make millions off of. Capitalist exploitation is not limited to child labor and puppet governments. Capitalist exploitation is most effective where it is passive and discreet. It is most effective in its ability to create the perception that greed, theft and dishonesty are features of our human nature, encouraging defeatism and acceptance of this economic system as the pinnacle of humanity.

By supporting artists who subvert and challenge these dominating dogmas, a counterculture is created where creativity can flourish free from predatory capitalists. Hip Hop’s tendency for the braggadocious might worry certain puritanical leftists, but expressions of joy and self-confidence have a very real and useful place in movements seeking recognition and justice. In the words of anarchist writer Emma Goldman:

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal {...} should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Endnotes

1 Fred Halliday, “The Opposition: Opposition Forces” in Iran: Dictatorship & Development (Suffolk, England: Pelican Books, 1978), 213.

2 Vanity Fair “Wu-Tang’s RZA Breaks Down 10 Kung Fu Films He’s Sampled” YouTube video, 13:34. 3 September 2019.

3 “The RZA – Kung Fu & Black Culture” Youtube video, 3:32. 17 October 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-G48dcH4Y

4 Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth” (New York, United States: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 236.

5 Phil Marshall, “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Iran” (Reading: England: Bookmarks: 1988), 53

6 Fred Halliday, Agricultural Development in “Iran: Dictatorship & Development” (Suffolk, England: Pelican Books, 1978)

7 Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London, England: New Left Books, 1979).

8 Vladimir Lenin, “Concentration of Production and Monopolies” in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).

9 Emma Goldman, “Living My Life (Two Volumes in One) (New York, United States: Cosimo, 2011) p.56