New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop

by Fatima Bhutto Narrated by Soneela Nankani

Overview

A lively, inside look at how Bollywood, Turkish soap operas, and K-Pop are challenging America's cultural dominance around the world.

There is a vast cultural movement emerging from beyond the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, and blue jeans. This is an audiobook about these new arbiters of mass culture arising from the East--India's Bollywood films, Turkish soap opera, or dizi, and South Korean pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity with traditional values in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that can be easily consumed, especially by the many millions coming late to the modern world and still negotiating its overwhelming challenges.

Acclaimed author Fatima Bhutto profiles Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the most popular movie star in the world; goes behind the scenes of Magnificent Century, Turkey's biggest TV show, watched by upwards of 200 million people across 43 countries; and travels to South Korea to see how K-Pop started it all, and how "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube video with one billion views.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

[The] urge to refashion the narrative of modern culture drives much of the writing in Bhutto’s razor-sharp, intriguing introduction to the various phenomena emerging from Asia. The huge popularity of Turkish TV across many parts of the world is part of a wider shift of cultural power from western countries to the global south, Bhutto argues in New Kings of the World.” —Tash Aw, Financial Times

“A short, well-researched, and engaging book, it contains elements of travelogue as well as cultural studies, taking the reader to meet a variety of people in diverse locations, from Bollywood fans high in the Andes to K-pop songwriters in Gangnam, Seoul.” —John A. Riley, Popmatters

“Fascinating.... Those who feared that globalization was just another word for Americanization were mistaken. As Bhutto’s book argues, popular entertainment has actually done just the opposite: it has made globalization a force for the un-Americanizaton of the world.” —Vir Sanghvi, Air Mail

“Author and memoirist Fatima Bhutto’s slender but potent volume for Columbia Global Reports surveys a shift in global popular culture in which America”s soft-power dominance is facing challenges from local art forms.” —Ken Smith, Asian Review of Books

“A probing look at some of the shifting tides of global culture. Having borne witness to the throes of political upheaval in her birth country of Pakistan, journalist and novelist Bhutto here explores the local roots and global impact of three contemporary pop-culture game-changers: Bollywood (India), dizi (Turkey), and K-Pop. Many American readers may be surprised to learn that what’s entertaining much of the rest of the world no longer hails from Hollywood or New York.... Witty and packed with detail, this is an intercultural shot that should be heard around the world.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Bhutto’s desire to constantly question the status quo has made her a scrupulous field reporter.... [She] uses the book to explore how these cultural forms have infiltrated unexpected corners of the world, and steadily become bastions in certain countries.” —Shrai Popat, The Juggernaut

“Shrewdly combining cultural and political analysis, original reporting and a fan’s passions, novelist and memoirist Fatima Bhutto’s New Kings of the World surveys three booming non-Western pop-culture scenes. Examining the continued global popularity of Bollywood and the recent ascent of Turkey’s dizi soap operas and South Korea’s K-Pop, Bhutto finds entertainment crafted to appeal to audiences alienated from America's pop culture.” —Shelf Awareness

“Fatima Bhutto doesn't miss a thing. From the Bollywood fan clubs of Lima to the refugee camps of northern Lebanon, she records and observes the terrain of global pop with curiosity, compassion, scalpel-sharp smarts, quiet humor, and an unfailing eye for the absurd. New Kings of the World is cultural reporting at its best.” —Ben Ehrenreich

“A delight, a must-read. Fatima Bhutto is the modern renaissance woman: after a searing memoir and an exploration of ‘ISIS brides,’ she turns her diagonal gaze across global pop culture, away from and beyond the lingua franca of English. The result is as effervescent as her subject matter: a hilarious and intelligent understanding of pop as primal need in contemporary life from Peshawar to Istanbul, Seoul to Lima—replete with characters, differences, and common rip-tides—and of the global economy that creates, and manipulates, that need.” —Ed Vulliamy

“Fatima Bhutto is one of the most stylish, thoughtful writers in the world today. This book will make you gurgle with cultural pleasure.” —Johann Hari

“Bhutto carefully dissects the guts of our popular culture.... Essential to understand the soul of our times.” —Ece Temelkuran

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-07-15
A probing look at some of the shifting tides of global culture.

Having borne witness to the throes of political upheaval in her birth country of Pakistan, journalist and novelist Bhutto (The Runaways, 2018, etc.) here explores the local roots and global impact of three contemporary pop-culture game-changers: Bollywood (India), dizi (Turkey), and K-pop (South Korea). Many American readers may be surprised to learn that what's entertaining much of the rest of the world no longer hails from Hollywood or New York but rather India, Turkey, and South Korea. In this engaging study, the author convincingly asserts that American dominance of popular culture was "facilitated by massive migration to urban areas, the rise of the middle class across the Global South, and increased connectivity"—not to mention "American military might." Though American pop culture may have resonated with "a Third World elite," Bhutto argues that "villagers uprooted from their homes and cultures and living in the crowded outskirts of big cities took no comfort in Sex and the City or the twangy music of Britney Spears. Instead, they turned to the products of Indian, Turkish, and Korean pop culture, whose more conservative values better aligned with "this majority's self-image and aspirations." Such vast, rapid urbanization, writes the author, marks a "journey from tradition to modernity…accompanied by profound turbulence" and resulting in "a geography without anchors, full of sexual and material deprivations, injustices, and inequalities." In the wake of such global sea changes, Bhutto investigates where millions today find their cultural moorings and why. Though focusing extensively on Bollywood's politically rooted narrative transformations and the meteoric rise of its biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, the author also traces and analyzes the appeal of dizi—sweeping, two-plus-hour soap opera-like TV epics often adapted from Turkish literary classics—and concludes with a fascinating look at K-pop's highly stylized production and enormous Western influence.

Witty and packed with detail, this is an intercultural shot that should be heard around the world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173480514
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Series:	Columbia Global Reports
Edition description:	Unabridged

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