![]() ![]() There are three quick shots of him-frontal, profile, and back to a frontal shot. ![]() Like the opening sequence of the Hong Kong print of its genealogical, aesthetic, and nominative forebear Enter the Dragon (1973), The Last Dragon commences with a musical martial arts montage.12 The viewer is treated to Leroy Green-a young, sweating, brown-skinned, wavy-haired, muscular man-practicing his martial arts forms. The opening scene of The Last Dragon unfolds like many films from Shaw Studios and Golden Harvest, the two preeminent Hong Kong martial arts film studios in the 1970s and early 1980s. The twist is that his lack of worldliness and sexual prowess, rather than his martial arts obsession, is what queers his Black masculine performance. Leroy’s embodiment as an odd-queer-figure, a Black man obsessed with martial arts culture, materializes the experience of Black and brown youth at the time. ![]() Leroy is immersed in the imaginary martial worlds of places like Hong Kong or Foshan, even though his material world is defined by Harlem hip hop dance, slang, and fashion. Instead it provides us with a queerly virginal hero who is able to navigate martial arts masculinity and Orientalist feminization in order to offer a new model of Black masculinity that contradicts and contrasts with that of hip hop film protagonists. The feel-good narrative ends with Leroy defeating the bad guys, winning the heart of the successful, worldly woman, and cementing his reputation as a local hero.Īlthough The Last Dragon ends in a typical, formulaic heterosexual romance, the film resists heteronormativity. Carry III), and Eddie Arkadian (Christopher Murney), an impish arcade czar. During his search, Leroy finds a love interest in a local club celebrity, Laura Charles (Vanity), and encounters two raffishly, comically wicked bad guys-a bullying martial arts tough guy–for-hire named Sho’Nuff, the Shogun of Harlem (Julius J. Leroy must venture into the wider world (other parts of Manhattan) to attain his last stage of actualization-the Glow (the culmination of the pupil’s “dragon” training). The Last Dragon narrates the journey of a young Black Harlem martial arts practitioner, Leroy Green (Taimak Guarriello), who has reached the end of his training with his teacher (Thomas Ikeda). This excerpt is taken from Hip-Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City (NYU Press) by Shanté Paradigm Smalls. ![]()
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