Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

di Sherrow O. Pinder (Autore)

State University of New York Press, 2021

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.

• Autore: Sherrow O. Pinder
• Editore: State University of New York Press
• Collana: SUNY series in African American Studies
• Anno: 2021
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Pagine: 231 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• Peso: 445 gr.
• EAN: 9781438484792

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