Inspired by a ten-year-old Kazakh’s startlingly enthusiastic reflections on the merits of Borat, rogue journalist Richard Poplak sets out on a two-year odyssey to explore modern Muslims’ appreciation and appropriation of America’s pop cultural fixations. He is curious to see what happens to our pop songs and sitcoms after they’ve been beamed beyond the closed doors of the Islamic world via satellite dishes, pirate radio and the internet. Hopping a flight from the Eurasian hinterlands to Tripoli, he searches in vain for a legendary alleyway where years before, hundreds of children reputedly acted out the scenes of Hello, Lionel Ritchie’s once celebrated MTV clip.
Libya is just the first stop on a globe trotting tour of more than a dozen struggling democracies, autocratic theocracies, failed states and rogue regimes. On the ground, he’s surprised to find thriving creative communities operating under the radar and a myriad of peculiar local obsessions, including Lebanon’s multi-million dollar plastic surgery industry, a bullish Saudi market for customized muscle cars and Indonesia’s thriving DIY hardcore punk scene. Along the way he’s body slammed by WWE enthusiasts in Afghanistan, bowls with the chief of police in small town Kazakhstan and keeps it realer than real with Palestinian hip hop artists amidst the staccato AK-47 fire of the Gaza Strip.
Each encounter is unique, but within the distinct local cultural flavours he finds unity in a generation of artists and enthusiasts keen to re-imagine their nations as places of opportunity, creativity and freedom by reinterpreting and remixing ideas from the west with their own established and emerging traditions. Poplak challenges North American readers to engage with these dispatches from their Eastern brethren, suggesting that a pop cultural dialogue may triumph where a centuries long tradition of terrorism, imperialism, warfare and nation building have failed.
About the Author: Richard Poplak is the author of the acclaimed Ja, No, Man: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa. He has written for, among others, The Walrus, THIS Magazine, Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail and has directed numerous short films, music videos and commercials. He lives in Toronto.
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