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

Music, Film, and Photography

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.