Enchanting David Bowie
Space/Time/Body/Memory
About Enchanting David Bowie
A longstanding, successful and frequently controversial career spanning more than four decades establishes David Bowie as charged with contemporary cultural relevance. That David Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable to his fans. He requisitions and challenges his audiences, through frequently indirect lyrics and images, to critically question sanity, identity and essentially what it means to be ‘us’ and why we are here.
Enchanting David Bowie explores David Bowie as an anti-temporal figure and argues that we need to understand him across the many media platforms and art spaces he intersects with including theatre, film, television, the web, exhibition, installation, music, lyrics, video, and fashion. This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory – themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output.
Table Of Contents
Introduction: Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond
Section One: Space
Chapter 1: Ziggy’s urban alienation – assembling the heroic outsider
Ian Chapman, The University of Otago, New Zealand
Chapter 2: Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: Major Tom and our Space Future
Michael Lupro, Portland State University, USA
Chapter 3: Desperately seeking Bowie: how Berlin Bowie tourism transcends the sacred
Jennifer Otter and John Sparrowhawk, University of East London, UK
Chapter 4: Confronting Bowie’s mysterious corpses
Tania Stark, Manager, Canasta Studio, Brisbane, Australia
Chapter 5: Bowie in East Asia – early fashion influences
Section Two: Time
Chapter 6: Bowie Melancholia
Will Brooker, Kingston, London, UK
Chapter 7: Bowie’s covers – the artist as modernist
David Baker, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
Chapter 8: Ain’t There one damn flag that can make me break down and cry? – The formal, performative & emotional tactics of Bowie’s singular critical anthem ‘Young Americans’
Amedeo D’Adamo, University of Switzerland (It) and the Universita Cattolica, Italy
Chapter 9: Mainstreaming Bowie – 2004 and the transformation of the mashup
Christopher Moore, Deakin University, Australia
Section Three: Body
Chapter 10: The Whiteness of David Bowie
Sean Remond, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 11: Idols and reality – The prophet returns proselytising the socio-political in art and life
Toija Cinque, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 12: Sound before Vision – a Sonic Re-evaluation of ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’
Dene October, University Arts London, UK
Chapter 13: The Eyes of David Bowie
Kevin Hunt, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Chapter 14: Celebrity and aging from a contemporary perspective.
Section Four: Memory
Chapter 15: He’s Not There – Velvet Goldmine and The Spectral Bowie Persona
Glenn D’Cruz, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 16: ‘You never knew that I could do that’ – Bowie, video art and the search for Potsdammer Platz
Daryl Perrins, University of Glamorgan, UK
Chapter 17: “Let them see you as you really are” – The Man Who Fell to Earth
Constantine Verevis, Monash University, Australia
Chapter 18: The wall between past and present – Bowie, memory, and Berlin
Tiffany Naiman, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Reviews
“This scintillating collection considers David Bowie’s contemporaneity, showing how the star looks very different today-and how every different Bowie is a hero, if just for one day. With each chapter like a crystal ball ricocheting around a multi-level labyrinth, Enchanting David Bowie is full of surprises and delights for the fan and scholar alike.” – Christopher Schaberg, Associate Professor of English, Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports and _Deconstructing Brad Pitt
“Consider for a moment, David Bowie’s extraordinary body of work, not just the music, but also his assimilation of different media practices: writing, painting, performance, film and video. This volume coheres around four thematic vectors–space, time, body and memory–to interrogate Bowie’s remarkable corpus of cultural production. In the process, Enchanting David Bowie–itself a standout work–not only illuminates but also construes ‘Bowie’–or versions of Bowie–that are at once compelling and fascinating.” – Constantine Verevis, Associate Professor of Film & Screen Studies, Monash University, Australia
“A comprehensive critical study of the enigma that is David Bowie has been a long time coming – and now it’s finally here! Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory offers a rich, thoughtful and intellectually challenging series of essays that paint a picture of the complex chameleon that is Bowie. The charismatic array of alter egos, the fascination with cosmic travel, the groundbreaking music that sang its way into the souls of many generations, the transformation of music performance into an art form, the transgressive play with gendered identity – this and so much more makes this collection a must have for anyone serious about Bowie, his identity, his music and his iconic status, which continues to spellbind into the twenty-first century.” – Angela Ndalianis, Head of Screen and Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia