ABSTRACT
Let us begin in Africa. These opening voices all evoke a zone of intersection, a realm where various cultural movements and modes criss cross: the cinematic and popular culture, film and theater, fashion and performance, Hollywood and kung fu, karate and pedagogy, Hong Kong and Africa. None of these voices speaks from or for African cinema, but all of them are concerned with the cinema in Africa. All of them gesture towards ways in which an “other” cinema-specifically kung fu-is deployed in the shaping of a local public sphere. Bulawayo will be my focus in this chapter. But I begin more generally in Africa-a continent, a region-both in order to
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situate Bulawayo within a larger context than the nation (though smaller than the global), and to signal that what follows will be grounded less in the question of influence and cinematic migration (the influence of Hong Kong action cinema on localized film cultures all over the globe, say), and more on the question of what a particular community, shaped by and in response to a particular history, has done with cinema, specifically Hong Kong action cinema.
