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.
Toija Cinque is a Senior Lecturer, Course Chair and Course Discipline Adviser in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia. Cinque’s most recent book is Communication, New Media and Everyday Life (2011). She edits the journal New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences.
Christopher Moore is Lecturer in Media and Communication at Deakin University, Australia. His main areas of interest are Games Studies, Digital Humanities and Online Persona, he 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 and editor of the journal Celebrity Studies, author of The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (2013), and Celebrity and the Media (2013).
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
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