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David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power

2018; University of Texas Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2018.0044

1527-2087

Ana Cristina Mendes,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Reviewed by: David Bowie: Critical Perspectives ed. by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power Ana Cristina Mendes (bio) David Bowie: Critical Perspectives edited by Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power. Routledge. 2015. $104.83 hardcover; $42.91 paperback; $49.95 e-book. 324 pages. A welcome addition to the growing body of academic studies dedicated to one of the most acclaimed artists and performers of contemporaneity, the edited volume David Bowie: Critical Perspectives collects seventeen essays, expertly organized around what is described by the editors on the half-title page as “key themes” in Bowie’s work, namely “textualities,” “psychologies,” “orientalisms,” “art and agency,” and “performing and influencing.” This editorial project originated with a David Bowie conference in 2012—Strange Fascination? A Symposium on David Bowie at the University of Limerick, Ireland—that at the time came from Devereux, Dillane, and Power’s endeavor to take a retrospective look at Bowie’s career. Prospectively, there was no way for the organizers to know that Bowie was about to “reemerge” in a few months with The Next Day album, after a decade-long “absence.” The fact is that in the two years leading up to the release of this album there was renewed media interest in Bowie’s career, fostered by the fortieth anniversary of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In 2013, shortly after the Bowie conference at the University of Limerick and the airing of the BBC’s documentary David Bowie: Five Years (Francis Whately, 2013), came the opening of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition David Bowie Is (a watershed curatorial project that drew fully on the collections of the David Bowie Archive and went on to become the most visited show in the V&A’s history) and Bowie’s nomination for the Mercury music prize. Bowie’s recent hypervisibility became part of the backdrop to the structuring and production of Devereux, Dillane, and Power’s edited volume, first when the hardcover was released in 2015 and then the paperback in the following year.1 This was a particularly timely moment given the remarkable speed at which book-length research and articles on Bowie [End Page 188] were being published. Although the publication rhythm has intensified following the artist’s death in January 2016, groundbreaking and stellar works such as Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore, and Sean Redmond’s edited volume Enchanting David Bowie had also been published in mid-2015 by Bloomsbury.2 The organization of this volume reflects from the outset a curatorial engagement with the broad conceptual frameworks through which the complex legacies of Bowie’s work can be analyzed. Preceded by Gavin Friday’s foreword, a heartfelt, avant la lettre eulogy, the editors’ preface—titled “Where Are We Now? Contemporary Scholarship on David Bowie,” a play on the eponymous single from The Next Day album—lays the groundwork for reassessing the relevance and implications of Bowie’s work and the debates it generated.3 The work of theorists and artists referenced in this foreword further confronts ideas of performativity, as well as issues of identity construction, branding and marketing, otherness, and transgression and strangeness, as well as the sites of production and consumption and fandom that are implicated in the reception of Bowie’s work. Overall, one of the strongest contributions of the volume is the refracting of this immense oeuvre through the texts of key theorists in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in particular, from Jean Baudrillard (chapters 10, by Tiffany Naiman, and chapter 4, by Bethany Usher and Stephanie Fremaux, the latter of which offers a table linking Bowie’s output between 1989 and 1999 and Baudrillard’s phases of the image) to Gilles Deleuze (chapter 14, by Dene October); from Carl Jung (chapter 5, by Tanja Stark) to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan (chapter 6, by Ana Leorne); from Edward Said (chapter 8, by Shelton Waldrep, and chapter 9, by Mehdi Derfoufi) to Roland Barthes (chapter 15, by Barish Ali and Heidi Wallace).4 This theoretical web woven around Bowie, using a comprehensive range of critical perspectives, from film studies to art history, from philosophy and psychology to...