Speaking to the New York Times, British satirist Sacha Baron Cohen says he felt compelled to bring Borat back to international screens not only to “make people laugh”, but to “reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism”.
I have not seen Borat 2 (Full title: Borat Subsequent Movie Film: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), but I am confident that film has good chances at succeeding in ridiculing its American audience, with such inflated plot lines as Borat keeping his daughter in a cage or the latter’s encounter with Rudy Giuliani.
The real issue is how truly funny it is for Sacha Baron Cohen to use a “Third World” country like Kazakhstan as a punchline. As a Kazakh woman, I want to highlight the inconsistency of Hollywood’s rhetoric of representation politics, which seemingly only matters when its subjects do not come from “developing” nations. There’s also the privilege that allows western creators to use other nations as tools, yet they are shielded from any responsibility by resorting to the naïve argument that these films are more about the US than any other country.
