Reorienting a Theme

Abstract

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.