About

Paul Foster is an Associate Professor of Chinese at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Modern Languages. His office is located in Swann 311, and he can be reached by phone at 404-385-0936. His research focuses on Chinese language and linguistics, contributing to the understanding and instruction of Chinese within the academic community. As part of his role, he is involved in teaching, curriculum development, and advancing research in Chinese linguistics, supporting the school's mission to promote language proficiency and intercultural understanding.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Art history
• Literature
• Media studies
• History
• Visual arts
• Psychology
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Essential Public Affairs for Journalists, James Morrison (2023), 8th ed.

  Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies · 2024-08-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Review of: Essential Public Affairs for Journalists , James Morrison (2023), 8th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 560 pp., ISBN 978-0-19287-459-7, p/bk, £31.99

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• Fighting without Fighting: Kung Fu Cinema's Journey to the West

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art history

  This book clearly and compellingly describes the globalization of kung fu cinema vis-à-vis the primary social discourses of the period. The introduction sets the stage for ensuing analysis, and chapter titles tantalizingly reference the global journey of Hong Kong's martial arts cinema to Hollywood within the discourse of race, gender, and transnationalism. A prefatory screenshot of David Carradine in the television show Kung Fu embodies the spectrum of conundrums addressed, capturing the “journey to the West” (a Ming dynasty novel reference) and suggesting the role that Bruce Lee had in bringing Chinese kung fu to the world. A muscular screenshot of Lee from The Way of the Dragon (13) indicates the situational complexity of kung fu globalization, which eventually created the conditions for success of later Chinese stars and “redefined and scrambled the field of representation” of East Asian stereotypes vis-à-vis the West (21). Books such as Edward Said's Orientalism theoretically background the idea of the “other,” and martial arts film becomes the interpretive vehicle connecting academic and popular audiences.Chapter 1 situates Hong Kong kung fu film in the historical background of a “first kung fu craze,” drawing on “a broader tradition of martial arts literature and folklore” (36) and early wuxia martial arts fiction in the twentieth century that offered a “refutation of the ‘sick man of Asia’ stereotypes circulating in the West” (39). Hong Kong wuxia film action carried the mythologization load as films such as Chang Cheh's The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) and King Hu's Come Drink with Me (1966) integrated realism and the martial folklore, ethics, and themes.Chapters 2 through 7 consider “the significance of the (kung fu film) craze in terms of identity” (30), reading an “American Connection” through actors who had Asian experience, Chuck Norris and Elvis Presley being two examples (77–78). Such popular references balance theory and action, while films like Billy Jack and the television series Kung Fu exemplify the embrace of American counterculture in the 1970s.Chapter 3, “The Craze Unfolds,” explores the conditions that made Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973) successful in the West, as “Hollywood's first attempt to produce a kung fu film” (100), despite Hollywood interpolation of a “Bond-type plot” in place of the “ethno-nationalistic” narrative (108). White's theoretical contribution shines as he situates the transformations that martial arts film underwent vis-à-vis such Orientalist depictions. He perceives “moral panic” as the kung fu craze images of kung fu violence faced “near-universal hostility from the critical establishment” (116), marked by “a degradation of formal and aesthetic quality in cinema” (118), which manifested in “ironic consumption” due to the popularity of the works and its spread (123) and “‘camp’ enjoyment” by the cultural elite (123).The titles of chapters 4 through 6, “Enter Black Dragons,” “White Men, Asian Arts,” and “Women Warriors,” each address a focal dimension of the assimilation of kung fu into Hollywood film through racial and gender agendas. The author asserts that “thinking about the relation of kung fu to Black popular culture allows us to understand the ways marital arts cinema and its iconography served as a means by which people from ethnic minorities could renegotiate their identities and place in society” (126). Actors Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon and Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx (1995) and Rush Hour (1998) and the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan exemplify the “mythology of kung fu movies” in association with Black American culture. Black power, in the context of the post–Vietnam War period and amid social movements, “enabled a much broader affirmation of ethnic pride” (138), creating space for identity outside the white mainstream, despite spectacle that detracted from the potential for political action. Cinema, martial arts, Vietnam, and other social phenomena are connected through the way “martial arts serve as an extension of a mindset that transforms other cultures into exotic possessions that can be mastered from a position of privilege” (166). White's contribution on the analysis of the relationship between kung fu and hip-hop via examples such as the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA is required reading for scholars and fans alike.Angela Mao Ying, a prominent kung fu star, was one of the performers “who acted as vehicles for both the excitement and the anxieties that the idea of the independent, strong woman evoked” (189). Interpretation problems such as the “objectification of action women” may exist, but White sees opportunities for “appropriation by women as images of empowerment” (197). The author addresses this by considering issues like the “objectification and fetishization of action women” (194), with the creation of a “new and just as damaging stereotype” of the “kung fu babe” (204).Chapter 7 analyzes the “second kung fu craze” of globalization, interpreting the extensive mythmaking, allegory, and subversive messaging of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2002), which rescued the first kung fu craze from dormancy with a feminist narrative. Along with an indeterminant nationalist narrative in Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002), these films roughly coincided with successes of the Rush Hour series, Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle (2004), the Kill Bill films (2003–4), and other later films like the Ip Man series (2008–19). Fighting without Fighting takes a big-picture view that convincingly portrays the journey of kung fu cinema “to the West” just at the right “moment of increasing global integration” (241). Scholars and general readers will profit from the analysis of the myths and manipulations of the journey, described clearly, accessibly, and deeply.

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• Introduction: Wuxia Fiction, Film and Construction of the Kungfu Industrial Complex

  Lexington Books · 2023-01-01

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• One. Kungfu Cultural Literacy: Situating Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction

  Lexington Books · 2023-01-01

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• Three. Canonization, Cultural Capital,National Character

  Lexington Books · 2023-01-01

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• Four. Kungfu Star Power: The Entertainment Jianghu

  Lexington Books · 2023-01-01

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• Jin Yong's Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex

  2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  • Literature

  Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex is an analysis of the role of Jin Yong’s stories and characters in the construction of the “kungfu industrial complex”—a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of martial arts fiction, film, and legacy. The author first explicates the “kungfu cultural literacy” that makes Jin Yong’s characters and stories intelligible and compelling to a wide audience and then argues that academic resistance to integrating his pop fiction into the canon of Chinese literature is overcome via the national character discourse. The author subsequently explores the role of actors, directors, and crews as they repeatedly adapted the novels for film and television and provided afterlives for Jin Yong’s characters, stories, and tropes, both kicking off actors’ careers and driving the globalization of kungfu action. Archetypical characters, multidimensional production and consumption of cultural capital and star power meet in a final analysis of the “Kung Fu Hustle Hustle,” which balances critical reality and a hopeful vision for China’s future.

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• Two. Jin Yong’s Rhetorical Kungfu: Cultural Capital of Humor

  Lexington Books · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex

  2023-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <JATS1:p>Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fiction and the Kungfu Industrial Complex is an analysis of the role of Jin Yong’s stories and characters in the construction of the “kungfu industrial complex”—a complicated, multi-dimensional cultural/business matrix related to the production and consumption of martial arts fiction, film, and legacy. The author first explicates the “kungfu cultural literacy” that makes Jin Yong’s characters and stories intelligible and compelling to a wide audience and then argues that academic resistance to integrating his pop fiction into the canon of Chinese literature is overcome via the national character discourse. The author subsequently explores the role of actors, directors, and crews as they repeatedly adapted the novels for film and television and provided afterlives for Jin Yong’s characters, stories, and tropes, both kicking off actors’ careers and driving the globalization of kungfu action. Archetypical characters, multidimensional production and consumption of cultural capital and star power meet in a final analysis of the “Kung Fu Hustle Hustle,” which balances critical reality and a hopeful vision for China’s future.</JATS1:p>

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• The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican Era Martial Arts Fiction, written by John Christopher Hamm

  East Asian Publishing and Society · 2020-10-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Awards & honors

• Ivan Allen College's E. Roe Stamps Excellence in Teaching Aw…