Re-creating Paul Bowles, the Other, and the Imagination

This work underscores the true brilliance and timelessness of colonial metaphors of authorship that extend into the postmodern Age. The emphasis is upon both re-invention and comprehensive scholarship on music and film.

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As we withdraw farther from American canonical literature and poetry and move closer to a re-appraisal of literature’s 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 music’s free transcription of tradition.

Re-Creating Paul Bowles includes several examples of films that adapt the author’s 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 academy—and liberation from his stereotypical cult figure identity, a positive force in the ethnic comprehension of Self and society.