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

Bhutto, Fatima

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1733623701 ISBN 13: 9781733623704

Publisher: Columbia Global Reports, 2019

Synopsis

"Witty and packed with detail, this is an intercultural shot that should be heard around the world." - Kirkus, starred review

A vast cultural movement is emerging from outside the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald’s, blue jeans, and other aspects of American mass-produced popular culture. This is a book about the new arbiters of mass culture ―India’s Bollywood films, Turkey's soap operas, or dizi, and South Korea's pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity, combined with traditional values, in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that strikes a deeper chord than the American version, especially with the many millions who are only just arriving in the modern world and still negotiating its overwhelming changes.

Fatima Bhutto, an indefatigable reporter and vivid writer, profiles Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the most popular star in the world; goes behind the scenes of Magnificent Century, Turkey’s biggest dizi, watched by more than 200 million people across 43 countries; and travels to South Korea to see how K-Pop started. Bhutto's book is an important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes.

About this title

About the Author

Fatima Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up between Syria and Pakistan. She is the author of five previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the memoir about her father’s life and assassination, Songs of Blood and Sword, was published to acclaim. Her most recent book is The Runaways, a novel.

She graduated from Barnard with a degree in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and has a masters in South Asian Government and politics from SOAS.

Review

“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

"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

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1733623701
• ISBN 13: 9781733623704
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206