Wiley, Mark V. Filipino Martial Arts: Cabales Serrada Escrima. Rutland (Vermont): C.E. Tuttle, 1997. 

Wiley, Mark V. Filipino Martial Culture. Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle Co., 1997. 

- the chapter attempts to establish the main discursive contours that appeared and developed through the 1980s—a decade in which ninjas and Shaolin monks explode onto the cultural landscape. This is followed by attention to the 1990s, in which three major events took place in the same year: the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the Wu-Tang Clan’s release of their enormously popular album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), and the appearance on children’s television screens around the world of ‘The Power Rangers’—all of which took place in 1993. The chapter then attempts to track the major discursive tendencies and contours of martial arts aesthetics through the first decade of the twenty-first century, up to the mainstreaming of combat sports in more recent years.

-The topics of history, tradition, and authenticity in Asian martial arts are highly conflicted. A handful of scholars have offered well-researched martial arts histories, which challenge what are often quite obviously preposterous myths. Yet even the most outrageous and ludicrous of myths about Asian martial arts seem tenacious. Articles and books – both scholarly and popular – continue to be published that trade entirely in myths and legends, snake oil and sorcery, presenting them as history.

- poses the question of when and where the analysis of the discursive entity ‘martial arts’ should begin. In exploring this, the chapter notes the prominence of origin stories in traditionalist martial arts, and interrogates their roles and functions. This leads to a discussion of what Rey Chow called ‘primitive passions’ in a deracinated, postmodern, and postcolonial world.