Reorienting a Theme

Dubai, not India, is the location of the world’s only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence jump from screen to simulated life at Bollywood Parks Dubai ( BPD ), allowing for the consumption of film and associated entertainment to occur trans-medially and transnationally. Accordingly, this essay delves into representations of culture and violence, through filmic imaginaries, that link South Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Using Bollywood/film studies alongside area and postcolonial studies and architectural history, I consider how theme parks work as manifestations of the fantastic, suturing cultural entertainment and racialized violence by proxy in a built space. In this, BPD is a site of culturally co-optive consumption and mediation between the orientalist, or re-orientalized, differences of Asian subjects to the exclusion of the occident(als). Focusing on its patrons and its film-based rides, and through research in the digital humanities, such as studies of first-person shooter games, I demonstrate how BPD serves as a mediascape that thrives on the reorientalized fantasy of Indian cinema. BPD thus provides a simulacral space in which patrons may vicariously test the limits (and possibilities) of South Asian-Middle Eastern multiculturalism, as well as Indian caste mores, against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Entertainment · Fantasy · Globalization · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Orientalism · Political science · Sociology · Theme (computing · Visual arts · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · South Asian Cinema and Culture