Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity
eBook - ePub

Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity by Sherrow O. Pinder in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & African American Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction: The Epigrammatic Layout of the Argument
  6. Chapter 1 Conceptual Framework
  7. Chapter 2 Blackness and a Black Identity
  8. Chapter 3 Michael Jackson and Racial Identification
  9. Chapter 4 Michael Jackson’s Nonconformity and Its Consequences
  10. Epilogue: Reflections
  11. Notes
  12. References
  13. Index
  14. Back Cover