Bowie in Berlin, or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Unmasked

Abstract

In this chapter, I use the perhaps unlikely figure of David Bowie to test the boundaries of the postcolonial intellectual, referring primarily to his years in Berlin, the city where, in his celebrated 1987 concert at the Reichstag, he sent his “best wishes to our friends who are on the other side of the Wall”. At the same time, I use Bowie’s extraordinary life and work, and the media machinery that surrounded it, to contest the so-called ‘demotic turn’ through which increasing intellectual authority has been given to ordinary citizens, each of whom can become a celebrity, if not necessarily an intellectual, in his or her own right.