How Turkish television, Bollywood and K-pop signify the end of the American century

It was the century of blue jeans, Coca-Cola and Madonna. America was the barometer of freshness. Where we sat in relation to its impulses, determined our proximity to modernity.

But this is no longer the 20th century. The world has changed. American prestige has been replaced by Donald Trump, Africa is full of films of zombies from Nigeria or soaps from South Africa. The Asia-Pacific region sees Indonesian cinema like never before.

In an increasingly multipolar world, with multiple actors pushing multiple agendas, the idea of ​​American culture as the arbiter of our cultural universe is over. And in his new book, New Kings of the World: Bollywood Dispatches, Dizi and K-Pop, the novelist and journalist Fatima Bhutto details the “new” cultural phenomena rising from the east and sweeping the globe.

Hollywood may not be dead yet, but Turkish shows – popularly known as popular cinema Dizi -Bollywood or Hindi, and South Korean pop music, affectionately known as K-Pop, are at the vanguard to challenge the mystique of American soft power, writes Bhutto in three essays that make up the book.

To be American is no longer to belong to a much-vaunted cultural elite, she writes in her book, written as a light but thoughtful introduction to the new cultural motifs of our time.

Bhutto spends most of the book on India and Bollywood, including a profile on “the King of Bollywood”, Shah Rukh Khan.

Bollywood has held a global audience for decades, starting with the former Soviet Union and North Africa as well as the Middle East. In the 1950s, notes Bhutto, Lebanese businessmen living in Nigeria imported Bollywood films into the country.

This is his second essay, on the global boom in Turkish television series, which is particularly captivating and discreet.

These Turkish Dizi series have come a long way since the 1980s. Although they also adopt a slower form of storytelling, their emphasis on music, the visual and various modes of storytelling distinguishes them from soaps and telenovelas. Each episode is also, in itself (two hours and large-scale production) an epic.

Dizi reaches “perfect balance”

As the world’s second-largest producer of television shows, Dizi’s audiences cover more than 100 countries, from South America, the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent, with translations available in Spanish, Persian, Arabic and Italian. Not so much in the English speaking world.

Turkish TV shows exploded across the subcontinent and far beyond because their heroes were modern, but not westernized [and] powered solely by the just power of values, writes Bhutto.

“The historic Turkish drama did not concern wars in Muslim countries like the homeland, nor the fiery sagas warning against unwashed wicked Muslim invaders: here, Muslims were kings”

– Fatima Bhutto

She says that it is precisely Dizis’ ability to portray modern life without imitating Westernization or American values ​​that sets them apart. They had reached the perfect balance between secular modernity and bourgeois conservatism, she said.

The shows rarely portray women in the hijab or headscarf, which many women in Turkey wear, illustrating cultural tensions, even as they weave centuries of love intrigue across class lines, distant lovers and charismatic outsiders.

In addition, gender dexterity synonymous with human and societal issues in Turkey, sparking conversations about religion, nationalism, gender, violence and Ottoman history, has brought universal appeal.

And there are reasons for this. While American television can often revolve around individuals and offer insights into loneliness, or obsessions with work, wealth, and power as the paragons of city life, Bhutto says Turkish Dizi has fueled stories who put values ​​and principles in the fight against the emotional and spiritual corruption of the modern world.

The historic Turkish drama was not about wars in Muslim countries like the homeland, nor the fiery sagas warning against unwashed wicked Muslim invaders: here Muslims were kings, writes Bhutto.

There is Fatmagulun Sucu Ne? ((What is Fatmaguls’ fault?), whose main character courageously pursues justice after having suffered a gang rape from wealthy brothers. Magnificent century told the story of a love story between sultans and concubine, but really concerned his journey from slavery to become the queen of an empire.

Likewise, when American TV shows push the boundaries of the question of love or sexuality and take the audience to futuristic or dystopian lands, Turkish shows, according to Bhutto, are more relevant, or offer a version of the life that the public would like to lead.

She observes that audiences in Latin America have become so tired of drug-related shows and heavy sexual content from their North American neighbors, Dizis has become a staple of family viewing. Prior to Riots broadcast in Turkey in the Middle East, including by diverting attention from the month of Ramadan (fasting and religious obligations as well as specially produced Arab soap operas) or“cause” divorces, Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas have been screened in places like Lebanon.

But more than television, they have also become huge and annoying turkish soft power tools. And the skepticism of Turkish imperial ambitions is a recurring theme. A Lebanese voice-over artist told Bhutto that the production values ​​are so high that the Arabs, who might be generally rigid to Ottoman history, are fooled into believing that the stories and themes belong to them.

The success of these shows in presenting an image of Turkey also invited the state to examine the subject and representations of the country. Each channel also offers a program revering the constant struggle of states against enemies and traitors – inside and beyond.

Indeed, the Turkish state has imposed direct and indirect taxes from time to time on the Turkish television industry due to concerns about the image of Turkey portrayed in these television series, Ece Algan, of the Institute media and creative industries from Loughborough University in London. , wrotein Heritage Turkey in 2018.

The Saudi blockade on Qatar (in which Turkey has decided to help Qatar) has resulted in Dizi being taken off the screens in parts of the Middle East. But that didn’t stop tourists from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from flocking to Istanbul.

Bhuttos’ analysis on Dizi suffers a little from having been written especially before the resounding success of Dirilis Ertugrul ((Ertugrul Resurrection), the story of the son of SuleymanShah and the father of Osman, founder of the Ottoman Empire, who captured the imagination of many Muslims and non-Muslims around the world.

Ertugrul defies many conventions attributed to the success of Dizi, with his close adherence and expression of Islamic values, including prayer, dress and philosophy, and for his willingness to portray war in shades of chivalry.

But the success of Ertugrul indicates that Dizi is a genre in progress.

If Dizi firmly placed Turkey on the modern cultural map, as a rearguard of American soft power, Ertugrul sparked a riot among Muslims in the Middle East and in the English-speaking world as a symbol of justice and leadership. He also provided fodder to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to spark the neo-Ottoman imagination as a statute building project.

In his narration of a vast cultural movement which travels the world, Bhuttos has an attentive eye for the strange and the difference makes his chapters on Dizi and Bollywood a treasure trove of secrets. She makes a series of important observations about the narrative environment offered by the Bollywood elite, presumably led by its biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan.

About her role in the expansion of Bollywood in the 1990s, she describes the films as a strange marriage between the Indian neoliberal fantasy of money, power and […] a resolutely cultural statement.

Bollywood is the shadow of his former self; intensely jingoistic, racy and pornographic in its representation of wealth and excess. Although it remains popular as an alternative to American mainstream cinema, it has become increasingly indistinguishable from its American counterparts.

On K-Pop, Bhutto highlights the history of the genre of pop music as an industry born almost entirely from an economic impulse to increase Korean exports. She describes K-Pop as a perfect storm of colonial history, Americanized culture and neoliberalism.

In a theme that is repeated throughout the book, the new kings of the world – as distinct as they are – are also in many ways vaguely different versions of American culture; reused, reconditioned, with a set of local values ​​carefully maintained for the world market. Where Bollywood and K-Pop transform good old Asian values ​​into bubble gum limericks, Dizi is just enough of both worlds to make its mark.

New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop, by Fatima Bhutto is available from Columbia Global Reports, an imprint of Columbia University