I just got word. He wrote many articles for us prior to writing his books. I worked with him for years and am very saddened to hear of his passing. We never met face-to-face but had a long running correspondence.

Brian Kennedy and the Development of Chinese Martial Studies



The Chinese martial studies community suffered a great loss with the recent passing of Brian Kennedy (1958-2019) at the age of 61. Any such event is a tragedy, and this was all the more unexpected as Brian was active and continuing to train in BJJ until the end. After hearing the news I began to go back through the many emails that we exchanged through the years. I was immediately reminded what a kind and intellectually generous person Brian was, always willing to point another student towards a critical source or offer timely advice. His insight will be greatly missed.

Brian was also a historian, and cultural translator, of the traditional Chinese martial arts. This is the capacity in which most of our readers will know him. Trained in law he had a fine analytical mind and a razor-sharp sense of discernment when it came to evaluating the many “newly discovered manuscripts” that began to emerge in the 2000s. His extended residence in Taiwan gave him an opportunity to study both the history and the practice of a variety of Chinese martial arts at a critical point in time. This combined experience allowed him to become something of a fixture in the world of popular martial arts magazines and publications well before his two better known volumes emerged in 2005 and 2010.

I find it somewhat jarring to realize that a student of martial arts studies has now entered the realm of history that he cared so much about. Still, as Brian would have been the first to note, there are different kinds of history. Most immediately, we have the history of individuals and their practices. Much of Kennedy and Guo’s co-authored work concerned itself directly with this material. His writings clearly conveyed the methodological understanding that verifiable, credible, sources on the activities of historic figures were proper subjects of historical writing. And I think that this was an area where his legal reasoning allowed him to excel.

But there has always been another sort of history. It resides in the study of the flow of ideas over time, the history of discourse, understanding and popular culture. Rather than simply asking “What did Wong Fei Hung do?” we can also ask, “What did his actions mean?” This is the school of historical thought that I am most interested in. And after some consideration I have decided that perhaps the best way to remember Brian Kennedy is to seriously examine his contributions to the development of Chinese martial studies. What were his ideas? And how did they shape the understanding of the TCMA that has emerged in the last two decades?

This blog post must be considered a very preliminary effort at what is an important question. Fully answering this question would require a lot of leg-work and thought. In part this is because I have yet to see a full bibliography of Kennedy’s writings on the Chinese martial arts. Assembling such a list would require some work as Brian (best known for his volumes on Jingwu and Chinese martial arts training manuals), was primarily an essayist.

Much of his research was originally released as columns or articles in various popular martial arts publications. He placed pieces in magazines like Kung Fu Tai Chi, and the para-scholarly journal Chinese Martial Studies. Perhaps the single greatest distributor of his writing was Classical Fighting Arts (and its prior incarnations) where Kennedy was a frequent contributor and columnist.

Nor were his articles the sort of light puff pieces that readers of popular martial arts magazines so often encountered. His topics varied widely ranging from a focused technical comparison of Jack Dempsey’s writings on boxing and Xingyiquan (published in Kung Fu Tai Chi), to a biographical analysis of Sun Lu Tang, a critical figure in China’s Republic era martial arts history (Classical Fighting Arts). Each piece was clearly laid out, rigorously argued, modest in its conclusions and written in such a way that one did not have to be a scholar to understand both the gist of the argument and its importance to current practice.

And these pieces just kept coming, year after year, in a variety of outlets. Every time I picked up a copy a Classical Fighting Arts I would immediately turn to Kennedy’s column to see what topic he was tackling in the current issue. He probably inspired my own approach to blogging.

The outlets that distributed Kennedy’s writing also shaped his role in the community. Rather than engaging with academic debates regarding the revisionist interpretations of the Qing era, or the role of violence in Chinese society, Kennedy primarily functioned as a sort of cultural translator placing the practices of current students in a larger historical context. His great contribution was the democratization of previously specialized knowledge about the Chinese martial arts.

This was possible due to his extensive personal study of several arts, and his access to a variety of historical sources while living and traveling in Taiwan. Yet the entire project was also anchored firmly in the realm of actual translation. Kennedy and Guo would offer Western readers a number of partial translations of important texts, such as the Jingwu Associations first memorial book. This project would serve as the basis of some magazine articles, and then eventually their 2010 book Jingwu: The School that Transformed Kung Fu (Blue Snake). The somewhat episodic nature of this work and their earlier 2005 study of martial arts training manuals stemmed from the fact that both books were essentially collections of previously published articles and essays.

Still, these tended not to be conventional translations in which a work is linguistically transcribed and reproduced in full. Kennedy’s goals was often to use the introduction of high quality, authentic, sources to stimulate a certain sort of understanding of the origin and nature of the Chinese martial arts themselves. I have always considered this to be a rather shrewd strategy. In truth very few of us are actually capable of learning much from a 90 year old manual with poor photographs. Yet while it may not be possible to learn Kung Fu from a book, one can certainly build a much more complete picture of the Chinese martial arts community that produced and supported such a project from the same pages. Specifically, how did these arts emerge? What were their creators’ values? How did this manifest within their physical practices? And how should the answers to these previous questions shape our understanding of the emergence of the modern Chinese martial arts more generally?

The success of this as a research strategy was born out by Kennedy and Guo’s 2005 Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey (Blue Snake). This book was something of a landmark in popular discussions of the Chinese martial arts. Again, many of the chapters in this volume were originally published elsewhere giving it an episodic feel. Other readers have complained that the authors essentially did what the title promised, offering only a survey and bibliography of Republic era Chinese fightbooks, rather than complete translations. One would need to wait for the emergence of the Brennan Translation Blog for that sort of project.
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