Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture

How do we imagine the ‘transnational’ flows and movements in culture so often invoked in critical rhetoric today? Acts of imagining enable as well as shape our research projects, and in cultural domains of enquiry (as distinct from, say, the study of capital or population movements), the imaginings we work with are often surprisingly thin – a blurry wash of rhetoric about movement, speed and space, spread through a critique of national or ‘bounded’ categories and affects as though the transnational can be imagined only in terms of what it is not. The term transnational itself is heavily spatialized today, carrying an insistent flow of images about ‘global’ forces rolling round ‘borderless’ worlds. Yet this was not always the case: in what Connery (2002) calls the ‘global Maoist’ 1960s and early 1970s, ‘transnational’ led by association to ‘capitalism’ and thence to ‘historical’ (and ‘dialectical’) analysis. What makes the difference between then and now is a historical question. However, what ‘history’ means to people now is a critical question. Studying the history of action cinema and its ‘spatializations’ is a good way to think about both these problems. Theories of globalization abound these days, but empirical work is needed to advance our understanding of how globalizing forces are working, or not working, in culture (Morris 2000). Action cinema is a useful case for study because it has well-developed aesthetic and industrial traditions – its transnationalism is not new, and the genre has already gone through several cycles of rising and declining popularity – and because ‘action’ so clearly dramatizes the conflictridden conditions of its own circulation and globally popular status. In an inter-Asian context, it also allows us to reflect historically on transnational industrial as well as aesthetic imaginings, which do not solely derive from the West and which ‘flow’, as it were, towards and through Western cinemas as well as around the region itself.