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This talk by Dr. Hiroshi Kitamura will challenge singular interpretations of Bruce Lee by juxtaposing multiple readings. Standard works treat this martial arts star as an icon of anticolonial, postcolonial, and subaltern resistance. My presentation will introduce Lee as an "Imperial Dragon" that helped sustain U.S. empire, and as an anti-Japanese hero who paradoxically empowered the Japanese. By situating Lee in a wider matrix of power that flowed across the Pacific, I aim to reveal the contradictory ways in which subaltern and dominant forces negotiate and even reinforce each other in the age of globalization. 

Dr. Kitamura is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department at William & Mary. His research interests are in the area of International Relations, Pacific World/Pacific Rim, and Popular Culture and Media. His book Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Cornell University Press, 2010), won the Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award from the Japanese Association for American Studies and the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies Book Prize. He is currently working on a study of Cold War cultural relations involving the United States and East Asia.   

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