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.
The narratives of the most successful of the dizis, unlike more explicit American soaps, she writes, "put values and principles in battle against the emotional and spiritual corruption of the modern world," achieving "the perfect balance between secular modernity and middle-class conservatism." (She notes that after 20 episodes of one massively popular drama of forbidden love, the leads still hadn't gotten past longing glances.) Bhutto argues that the traditional values celebrated in dizis and Bollywood films appeal to the millions of rural people who in recent decades have, in India and other countries, migrated into cities.
Bhutto (Songs of Blood and Sword) tracks these phenomena as she visits sets in Istanbul, accompanies Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan on a trip to Abu Dhabi and meets fervent fans of Khan in Peru. Her tone alternates between amusement--she notes that Khan has played men named "Rahul" in eight films--and clear-eyed outrage. That anger is strongest when she reports on Bollywood's embrace of the Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi and labels many 2019 films "Modi mood music." Still, her lively book remains hopeful, especially in its considerations of the complexities of global pop and its audience. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor