A close examination of the complexity inherent in Michael Jackson’s ambiguous racial identity.
In Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity, Sherrow O. Pinder explores the ways in which the late singer’s racial identification process problematizes conceptualizations of race and the presentation of blackness that reduces blacks to a bodily mark. Pinder is particularly interested in how Michael Jackson simultaneously performs his racial identity and posits it against strict binary racial definitions, neither black nor white. While Jackson’s self-fashioning deconstructs and challenges the corporeal notions of 'natural bodies’ and fixed identities, negative readings of the King of Pop fuel epithets such as 'weird’ or 'freak, ’ subjecting him to a form of antagonism that denies the black body its self-determination. Thus, for Jackson, racial identification becomes a deeply ambivalent process, which leads to the fragmentation of his identity into plural identities. Pinder shows how Jackson as a racialized subject is discursively confined to a 'third space, ’ a liminal space of ambivalence.
Spis treści
Introduction: The Epigrammatic Layout of the Argument
1. Conceptual Framework
2. Blackness and a Black Identity
3. Michael Jackson and Racial Identification
4. Michael Jackson’s Nonconformity and Its Consequences
Epilogue: Reflections
Notes
References
Index
O autorze
Sherrow O. Pinder is Professor of Political Science and Multicultural and Gender Studies at California State University, Chico. She has published several books, including Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present.
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