The new global popular culture is a benign version of the challenge on multiple fronts—economic, political, military, diplomatic—to the ideas and norms that the West has tried to impose on the rest of the world. Bhutto’s book is an important dispatch from a new order that is taking form before our eyes. It isn’t just globalization, as a broad concept, that has generated the radical changes in popular culture. The new popular culture meets a strong need that American culture has ignored for years. Around the world, people are moving from a traditional village life to megacities where the culture is jarringly different. Hollywood just doesn’t address this vast, overwhelming experience but others do.

In ‘New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop’, Fatima Bhutto brings the news that this standard view is badly out of date. In popular culture, as in politics, we now live in a multipolar world. The United States is no longer the acknowledged leader; the global soft power that popular culture embodies emanates from places like Mumbai, Istanbul and Seoul.