Re-creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination: Music, Film, and Photography

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As we withdraw farther from American canonical literature and poetry and move closer to a re-appraisal of literatures impact upon the arts through media, we may easily find a match for greater humanism and popular interaction in American rock culture through Paul Bowles. In this work, Bowles is re-invented within the postmodern, the postcolonial, and the renegade future underscored by liberal elites that had breathed new life into the American counterculture. Re-Creating Paul Bowles attests to the moments of relentless humanism and imaginative transformation that are most dreamlike, engaging the antagonism of psychology with imperialism at last. In his youth a classical composer and critic, Bowles deserves credit for spawning new generations of rock and pop music through his use of sound and tapping of non-Western or non-European folk music, bringing classic ethnography to the rock generation with Music of Morocco. Re-Creating Paul Bowles examines the Latin American, American, African, and Arab moments of his scholastic effort, a primary beginning for understanding modern popular musics free transcription of tradition. Re-Creating Paul Bowles includes several examples of films that adapt the authors personal life and times, the production of surrealist technique in film and literature, and the re-invention of classic works such as The Sheltering Sky and Collected Stories. It assumes the technique for re-production allows the elder Bowles greater freedom in crossing cultural boundaries and overruling the colonialist separateness that guarded cultural content for centuries. Bowles has always deserved re-appraisal in the American academyand liberation from his stereotypical cult figure identity, a positive force in the ethnic comprehension of Self and society.

Reviews

A remarkable expatriate American, Paul Bowles (19101999) has been thoroughly discussed as a writer. He is best known as the author of The Sheltering Sky (1949), a novel made into a brilliant film by Bernardo Bertolucci. Chandarlapaty looks at other dimensions of Bowles's fame. He was the subject of photo essays and documentary films, and he was a composer. He recorded Moroccan folk music. He inspired Beat writers such as William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who knew him in Tangier. He had an impact on rock music and jazz (the Rolling Stones were fans). Chandarlapaty writes in depth about this major cultural figure, someone deserving the overworked label icon. The research in this book is impressive in the light of Bowles's multidimensional talents. . . .This well-documented bookChandarlapaty's heavy use of jargon notwithstandingwill serve as a good contribution to the discussion. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE *
Re-Creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination is perhaps the first significant full-length study of the artist's work since his death in 1999 and certainly the most comprehensive evaluation, to date, of Bowles' eclectic output. * The Mailer Review *
Raj Chandarlapatys strikingly probing analysis of Paul Bowles complicated amalgam of music and literature leads to stimulating new perspectives on colonial and postcolonial experience, particularly his intricate examination of deterritorialization. Post Chandarlapaty, Bowles can never again be read in an ideological confinement. -- Phillip Sipiora, University of South Florida
Chandarlapaty argues provocatively that Paul Bowles challenged literary modernisms focus on isolation, alienation, and imposition of order and control, and offered instead an imagination-based outlook that rejects the world view of societies rooted in Western colonialism. -- Richard B. Schwartz

Author Bio

Raj Chandarlapaty is assistant professor of English at the American University in Afghanistan.