What happens when a first rate scholar and long-time martial arts practitioner turns his attention to an orphan discipline? First, the field can never be considered marginal again; second, the founding fathers of martial arts studies will be challenged to step up their game to the next level; and finally, readers will get a crash course in the language and concepts of post-modern scholarship, allowing them to follow the ongoing debates in martial arts studies, where landing one good accusation of Orientalism, sexism or essentialism is like a flying roundhouse kick to the head. For those who seek a deeper knowledge of the role of martial arts in contemporary culture, and hence a deeper self-knowledge, they will find no better inspiration than Paul Bowman's Martial Arts Studies.

Douglas Wile, Author of Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing Dynasty and T'ai Chi's Ancestors.

Following Nietzsche, Paul Bowman likes philosophising ‘with the hammer’. I think what he wields as a writer is more like a magic wand. Whisking received ideas of discipline, institution, tradition, body, nation, narration, media, theory and reality out of their usual academic slots, Bowman sends them spinning into the air to meet dreams, a visionary politics of culture and deep learning in martial arts. The result is intoxicating, a rush of energy from page to page. In Martial Arts Studies, impossible combinations take sparkling new shape and thinking is free to begin again.

Meaghan Morris, Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

Occasionally, a book is published that makes the ‘expert’ reviewer wish that he or she might have had the chance to read it before ever publishing anything on the topic at hand. Martial Arts Studies is just such a book ... Paul Bowman has done a wonderful job of both delightfully entangling us in the object of study and disrupting perhaps too comfortable relationships with the boundaries of our respective disciplines.

Martial Arts Studies