Fatima Bhutto: How Bollywood, K-Pop & Dizi Are Reshaping Global Culture
About The Event
A new global popular culture is taking form before our eyes and its roots may surprise you. In her latest account, “New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop,” Fatima Bhutto challenges America’s mass-produced popular culture, making the case that the new global pop culture meets a strong need that American culture – with its Hollywood lights, McDonald’s and blue jeans – has ignored for years. In pop culture, as in politics, we now live in a multipolar world. Around the globe, people are moving from traditional village life to megacites where the culture is jarringly different. Hollywood just doesn’t address this vast, overwhelming experience. Instead, the new global soft power that pop culture embodies emanates from places like Mumbai, Istanbul and Seoul.
About The Speaker
Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan-born Pakistani journalist, poet and author. She began her writing career by publishing her first non-fiction novel, Whispers of the Desert, at the age of 15. Her first fictional novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon was longlisted in 2014 for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her most recent book, New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop, discusses the mass cultural movement occurring and its global influences. Throughout her career she has published over five critically acclaimed books, documenting world cultures, her personal life, and the lives of others.
Born into one of the world’s most prominent political dynasties, she is the niece of the former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and granddaughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Fatima Bhutto grew up in Syria and Pakistan under members of this dynasty and has since stated that she has ruled public office out of her future. She has stated that she prefers to remain politically active through her activism and writing.
Fatima Bhutto graduated from Barnard College Colombia University in New York, majoring in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures. She went on to receive an M.A. in South Asian Studies at the University of London.
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