Tu Me Manqueras Toujours, Je Ne T' Oublierai Jamais et Je T' Aimerai a Jamais

Alternately Greta Garbo, Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Thin White Duke… How many masks has David Bowie worn and then fallen off during his lifetime? Bowie is a chameleon character. He reinvents himself in and through the media, and the artistic scenes where he evolves. Three authors, all Anglo-Saxon academics, have taken up the protean subject that is David Bowie. They lean in and reflect on its cultural and artistic significance. And go in search of his true self under the masks. They write a text with three voices, where each one seizes a fragment of the personality or the image of David Bowie, which they dissect into four parts: (1) How Bowie creates a certain type of urban, extraterrestrial, touristic and intergalactic spaces in which he exists; (2) how he subverts and renegotiates time and the temporal through themes of resurrection, nostalgia, and longing; (3) how it embodies gender, race, and sexuality by opening up transgressive capacities; (4) how his work generates, reproduces and invokes memory? And how does it allow memorization by sound, vision, allusion, memory and oblivion? Under a provocative light, the authors attempt to flush out Bowie's being. Under his alter egos that he creates, then that he kills to always be reborn in another form. They help us to understand the importance of its influence and the strength of its attraction throughout the world and over several generations. In the end, the portrait of an enchanter, a sorcerer appears. This is not a linear biography but, like the very personality of Bowie. It is a mosaic biography, fascinating because open to the different incarnations of an artist who remained iconic until the end. From his debut to the ultimate album, Blackstar, David Bowie, the enchanter intends to do justice to the considerable work of an extraordinary artist while showing the many ways in which his work enchants contemporary social and cultural life.