Michael Jackson and the quandary of a Black identity /Sherrow O. Pinder.

Pinder, Sherrow O.,

Michael Jackson and the quandary of a Black identity /Sherrow O. Pinder. - 1 online resource (223 pages) - SUNY Series in African American Studies .

Includes bibliographies and index.

Conceptual framework -- Blackness and a Black identity -- Michael Jackson and racial identification -- Michael Jackson's nonconformity and its consequences.

"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."--ProQuest website.



9781438484815


Jackson, Michael, 1958-2009 --Criticism and interpretation.


Black people--Race identity.
African Americans--Race identity.
Music and race.


Electronic Books.

ML420 / .M534 2021