From Jeet Kune Do to Ukungcweka: What Martial Arts Taught Me About Abolition

• In Event: Petals of Blood, Fruits of Freedom: Sustaining Educational Lifeways for Abolition

Abstract

OBJECTIVES

Petals of Blood: Auto-ethnographically engaging the epistemic, ontological, and axiological foundations of my perspectives on abolition, I focus on my formative introduction to martial arts; especially through Bruce Lee and his film Enter the Dragon.

Fruits of Freedom: For the purposes of this paper, I focus on ethnographic work conducted within an after-school martial arts and boxing program, as well as a grassroots youth organizing organization. I reflect upon how my ongoing and simultaneous study of martial arts has informed how I understand what it means to educate and organize for abolition.

FRAMEWORK

This paper considers broad theorizations by Fanon (1961) about the generativity of violence in movements for collective liberation, as well as literature that reveals the role of martial theory and praxis in global anti-colonial and abolitionist struggles on the lands of what is now known as Kenya (Thiong’o, 1992), South Africa (Mandela, 2008), Mexico (Van Bavel, 2021), and China (Lee, 1975).

METHODS & DATA

Primarily making use of auto-ethnography from an anti-colonial perspective, I situate the “personal within the political” (Hernandez-Carranza et al., 2021, p. 1524), and follow a methodological commitment to “strong reflexivity, relational engagement, personal vulnerability, and open-ended rejection of finality and closure” (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2016, p.59).

Assessing my own personal reflections on abolition and education in the context of my life, my auto-ethnographic data emerges from my upbringing in San Bernardino, Colton, and Riverside, California, as well as my continual training in martial arts from the time I was a freshman in college to the present.

The ethnographic data emerges from over 1,000 hours of ethnographic research over 8 years in the space-time of the 2010s to early 2020s in the California Bay Area (“Bay Grove”). The primary site was an after-school space (“Martial Arts and Boxing Club”) within a public charter high school (“Bay Grove High School”).

FINDINGS

Petals of Blood: While constituted through the White gaze as simply a “Kung Fu flick,” activists, scholars, and educators, including my young self, saw Enter the Dragon as so much more. Lee’s film showcases a story of abolition.

Fruits of Freedom: In martial arts across the world, more often than not, the goal is not to destroy your opponent (e.g., ukungcweka and community-rooted isiXhosa and isiZulu martial arts, Mandela, 2008). Instead, martial arts varyingly aim to prepare people to master themselves and their respective ability to neutralize force without hurting themselves or their opponent(s). Within these traditions, learning martial arts is about learning how to bring oneself, and those around you, into balance, harmony, and interdependence. The goal is to eliminate the injustice of exploitative, dominating, and cruel aggression, and to use that energy to eradicate the systems that made that aggression possible. This is abolition.

SIGNIFICANCE

The embodied theory, praxis, and educational lifeways of martial arts has rarely been considered in conversation with abolition, in spite of anti-colonial and abolitionist struggles’ long relations with the art and mastery of force.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author