THE SRK WORLD ORDER
In her examination of how popular culture from the East is challenging American cultural dominance, Fatima Bhutto asks the wrong questions and gets only obvious answers
Fatima Bhutto, in her book New Kings of the World, out this month, notes that “[a]udiences from Syria to Sudan can hardly identify with, let alone aspire to, Hollywood’s white fantasies of power, wealth, and sex”. Having once held the world exclusively in its thrall, the influence of American pop culture, Bhutto argues, is waning. The ‘threat’ to American cultural supremacy is a mishmash of Bollywood movies, Turkish soap operas (or dizi), and canned South Korean pop music.
We live, Bhutto observes, in a “multi-polar” world in which American cultural hegemony is necessarily weaker. As statements of the obvious go, this is hardly current. Bollywood movies, for instance, have been around as long as American ones. Indeed, commercial Hindi cinema, perhaps, had a more significant cultural influence from the 1950s to the 1970s, when people around the world found, in its poorer, more communitarian ethos, a genuine ideological alternative to Hollywood. Now, while the stars might be brown rather than white, many Hindi films, like their Hollywood cousins, are vacuous tributes to shopping. Bhutto addresses this, as she does the subservient ‘patriotism’ of Bollywood, but does not ask why, then, it should matter that both Shah Rukh Khan and Tom
Cruise are global stars. But of course they are; they’re both part of the same machine.
In the absence of a coherent thesis, she travels the world in a gesture at reportorial energy. She recounts what happens on these trips with tedious fidelity, as if hoping we won’t see the forest for the thickets of extraneous detail. As if the shapelessness of her book won’t matter as long as she can distract us with folderol about SRK fan groups in Peru. She’ll write about the statist origins of Kpop, but not ask what it says about us that these groups can be so precisely engineered for global consumption and success. Or she’ll go to the Lebanese-Syrian border to visit refugees from Homs obsessed with dizi, but not ask why it matters that they’re watching Turkish rather than American television?
Bhutto doesn’t even ask why dizi, Bollywood films and K-pop should be grouped so arbitrarily together in opposition to American pop culture in the first place. She does not engage critically enough with her material to work out if the American worldview alongside its audience share is being challenged. Besides, it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s cool that we can watch Sacred Games and Game of Thrones, but so what? New Kings... makes connections where none exist to make a point not worth making. ■