Netlix Ninjas and the Legacy of the Kung Fu Craze: Asiaphilia and Asiaphobia in Marvel’s Daredevil Paper for the conference “Bruce Lee’s Cultural Legacies,” Annual Martal Arts Studies Conference 2018, 11–12 July, Cardif University. In 1973, the “kung fu craze” swept America, Europe, and the world. For some, this marks a pivotal moment in the contact between Occident and Orient, decisively transforming the West’s fantasies about its Asian “others.” 1 The kung fu craze hit, of course, just as the geopolitcal order was shifing. Its great icon, Bruce Lee, became the frst truly global superstar 2 just as “globalisaton” was taking of, and as cultural pluralism was startng to grow in the wake of decolonisaton, the civil rights movement and feminism. Lee and the kung fu flm were famously new, in partcular, in providing images of Chinese and Asian masculinity that reversed Orientalist stereotypes of weakness, efeminacy and subservience, or perversion and cruelty. Lee’s charismatc heroism and his lithe, athletc body, a powerful pole of male desire and identfcaton, was a far cry from Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan. Its appeal in China, and East Asia more broadly, can be relatvely easily understood as a mater of natonal, ethnic or racial pride. 3 But, as his internatonal stardom atests, Lee and the image of “kung fu” seem to have had a powerful resonance beyond this context. Lee’s 1 See Paul Bowman, Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film–Fightng–Fantasy–Philosophy (Amsterdam: Ropdopi, 2010), pp. 7–65 for a much wider and nuanced discussion of the ways that this has been seen to be the case – and also of the ways that I might here, for the sake of brevity, be overstatng it… Drawing on Gary Krug, Bowman has characterised the kung fu craze as a kind of anthropological “frst contact.” 2 So, in any case, claims Davis Miller in The Tao of Bruce Lee (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 96, cited in Bowman, Theorizing Bruce Lee, p. 21: “He became the frst truly internatonal flm luminary (popular not just in the United States, Great Britain and Europe, but in Asia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and on the Indian subcontnent – in those pre-Spielberg days people in most natons were not partcularly worshipful of the Hollywood hegemony).” 3 See Teo’s important chapter on Bruce Lee as icon of “abstract natonalism” in his Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997), pp. 110–121. 1