Content area
Brucesploitation is a loosely connected cycle of films that emerged following Bruce Lee’s death in 1973. These works, often dismissed as exploitative knock-offs, serve as a revealing archive of transnational film production, star image repetition, and ideological circulation. This project investigates the cycle’s visual and narrative patterns and how they reflect shifting cultural fantasies, racial politics, and industrial strategies. Chapter One situates Brucesploitation within the history of exploitation cinema and articulates the commercial and mythic forces that shaped Bruce Lee’s star persona. Chapter Two turns to the visual field of credit sequences, film posters, comics, and the films of Jim Kelly to propose an intersectional visual politics of cross-racial iconography that both reflects and reimagines political solidarity within this field. Chapter Three applies Lacanian and Marxist ideology critique, particularly via Slavoj Žižek, to the Bruce Lee biopic and clone films, arguing that they operate as symptomatic responses to cultural loss, commodity fetishism, and the desire to resurrect a figure that resists closure. Chapter Four explores how digital replication and symbolic fragmentation have transformed Lee into a posthuman, global icon who hauntologically persists the internet media landscape. By centering this historically marginalized body of media, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in film studies, star studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies, while offering a new framework for understanding mimicry, commodification, and the politics of visual repetition in global media.