About the Book
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
List of Contributors
Introduction
Section One: Space
Section Introduction
Chapter 1: Keeping Space Fantastic: The Transformative Journey of Major Tom
Michael Lupro, Portland State University, USA
Chapter 2: Ziggy’s Urban Alienation : Assembling the Heroic Outsider
Ian Chapman, The University of Otago, New Zealand
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
Tanja Stark, Manager, Canasta Studio, Brisbane, Australia
Section Two: Time
Section Introduction
Chapter 5: Time Again: The David Bowie Chronotope
Will Brooker, Kingston University, UK
Chapter 6: Bowie’s Covers: the Artist as Modernist
David Baker, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
Chapter 7: Ain't There One Damn Flag That Can Make Me Break Down and Cry?: The Formal, Performative and Emotional Tactics of Bowie's Singular Critical Anthem 'Young Americans’
Amedeo D’Adamo, University of Switzerland (It) and the Universita Cattolica, Italy
Chapter 8: 2004 (Bowie vs Mashup)
Christopher Moore, Deakin University, Australia
Section Three: Body
Section Introduction
Chapter 9: The Eyes of David Bowie
Kevin Hunt, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Chapter 10: Semantic Shock: David Bowie
Toija Cinque, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 11: The Whiteness of David Bowie
Sean Remond, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 12: David Bowie is … Customizing
Helene Thian, University of the Arts London/London College of Fashion Postgraduate Programme, UK
Section Four: Memory
Section Introduction
Chapter 13: He's Not There: Velvet Goldmine and the Specters of David Bowie
Glenn D’Cruz, Deakin University, Australia
Chapter 14: Between Sound and Vision: Low and Sense
Dene October, University Arts London, UK
Chapter 15: Where Are We Now?: Walls and memory in David Bowie’s Berlins
Tiffany Naiman, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Chapter 16: ‘You never knew that, that I could do that’: Bowie, Video Art and the Search for Potsdammer Platz
Daryl Perrins, University of Glamorgan, UK
About the Author :
Toija Cinque is Senior Lecturer, Course Chair and Course Discipline Adviser in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. She edits the journal New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences.Cinque's forthcoming works include Changing Media Landscapes: Visual Networking (2015) and the co-authored Communication, Digital Media and Everyday Life, 2nd ed, (2015).
Christopher Moore is Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at Wollongong University, Australia. He is a researcher in Games Studies, the Digital Humanities, Celebrity and Persona studies, and recently co-edited the collection Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education (2013).
Sean Redmond is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Deakin University, Australia. He's the editor of the journal Celebrity Studies, author of The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (2013), and Celebrity and the Media (2014).
Review :
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.
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.
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.
If Bowie, ever the chameleon, is in the habit of leaving aesthetic corpses behind, the goal of Enchanting Bowie is to dissect them. The volume is organized around four thematic concepts: space, time, body, and memory … This may sound disconcerting to Bowiephiles and musicologists, but the end result is actually quite impressive. Bowie’s performance becomes a supple text that can be endlessly reinterpreted.
The overwhelming strength of this volume is its extremely broad definition of Bowie’s ‘work’. From album covers, to a customised jacket, to his atypical eyes, we move far beyond monochrome analysis of lyrical content. Its inter- and cross-disciplinary approach, presenting analysis informed by film-making, fashion, musicology, performance and drama, as well as cultural studies and media and communication, results in some highly creative contributions… The effect of this volume as a whole is that much of Bowie’s output, however familiar to the reader, cannot be viewed in the same way after encountering these contributors’ analyses.
