Abstract
This chapter examines the engagement between Bollywood and Hong Kong through a critical reflection on Chandi Chowk to China (2009). The film’s locative articulation of urban spaces, combined with an integrated use of vestment and language between Indian and Chinese characters, manifest the interstices between the dual cinematic allegories. Crucial to this examination is the power relation involved in controlling the visual image of India and China. The imagined spaces of India’s China and China’s India are reconfigured as the profane comedy and symbolically shifted through the circuit of Sino-Indic elisions. Similarly, the film’s fusion of Hong Kong martial arts with Bollywood music and dance unites the twin paragons of global cinema, enabling a reading of the film that engages with these narrative trajectories.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter draws on the insights of Ward Churchill (February 25, 2002) to define globalization as “a structural interlock between state and corporation that allows for the consolidation of a power block that is capable of projecting itself upon the world, exporting itself in terms of an order or hierarchy that works to the detriment of all it encounters for the benefit of those that organized it in the first place.”
- 2.
The physical absence of whiteness does not diminish its ideological presence (Fanon 1994).
- 3.
As Sean M. Tierney (2006) states, “In each film, the protagonist’s ethnicity is questioned as an inhibition but found to be irrelevant. It is the position of the present study that these films are beneficially understood through a theoretical framework of strategic rhetoric of whiteness expressed in four common themes: The supraethnic viability of whiteness, the necessary defeat of Asians, the disallowance of anti-White sentiment, and the presence of at least one helpful and/or generous Asian cohort.”
- 4.
From Kickboxer (1989, Mark DiSalle and David Worth) to The Karate Kid, Part II (1986, John Avildsen), the trope of a mostly White martial arts student who ends up with his master’s attractive female relative is a familiar one to Hollywood.
- 5.
Adopting the reading of Frank B. Wilderson III (2008: 107), “Black Skin, White Masks is attentive to the subject’s structural positionality. This is the level of subjectivity that bears most essentially on political ontology. It is the level of subjectivity that most profoundly exceeds and anticipates the subject. It literally positions him/her paradigmatically. … One can … assert ‘identity’ at the level of preconscious interests … but one cannot dismantle the filial economy through which one is always already positioned as boy or girl.”
- 6.
The use of the ontology, of the condition of Sinity, first appeared in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Roland Barthes (1973: 107) describes it as an ephemeral concept: “China is one thing, the idea which a French petit bourgeois could have of it not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium-dens, no other word possible but Sininess.” He goes on to add in his notes, “Or perhaps Sinity? Just as if Latin/latinity=Basque/x, x=Basquity.”
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Mikita, M.A. (2016). Mirroring Alterity: The Imaginary China and the Comedic Self in Chandni Chowk to China . In: Lee, JH., Kolluri, S. (eds) Hong Kong and Bollywood. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94932-8_14
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