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…
