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Global culture

Andrew Marr with Fatima Bhutto, Erica Whyman, Sook-Kyung Lee and John Burnside on the rise of popular culture around the world.

The writer Fatima Bhutto celebrates the new global popular culture emerging from the East. She tells Andrew Marr that the West’s soft power dominance is on the wane as K-Pop, Dizi and Bollywood take the world by storm.

The Korean artist Nam June Paik was among the first to foresee the importance of mass media and new technologies, coining the phrase ‘electronic superhighway’. Sook-Kyung Lee is co-curating a global tour of his work, starting at Tate Modern.

A new play, Museum in Baghdad, brings together the stories of its British founder Gertrude Bell in 1926 with Ghalia Hussein’s attempts to reopen it in 2006 after looting during the war. The RSC director Erica Whyman says the play questions the role of culture in helping to create a nation.

And the writer John Burnside turns to the poets of the 20th century to give voice to an alternative cultural history of the time. He draws on the work of poets, both renowned and unjustly obscure, to give shape and meaning to the world.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Picture credit: Tate

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42 minutes

Last on

Mon 14 Oct 2019 21:30

Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto is a writer whose books include The Shadow of the Crescent Moon and Songs of Blood and Sword.

New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop is published by Columbia Global Reports.

Fatima will speak at Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival on 21 October.

Sook-Kyung Lee

Sook-Kyung Lee is Senior Curator, International Art (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational) at Tate Modern.

Nam June Paik opens at Tate Modern on 17 October.

John Burnside

John Burnside is a poet, novelist and Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century is published by Profile Books.

Erica Whyman

Erica Whyman OBE is Deputy Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

A Museum in Baghdad, directed by Erica Whyman, is on at the RSC in Stratford until January.

Broadcasts

  • Mon 14 Oct 2019 09:00
  • Mon 14 Oct 2019 21:30

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