Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity
Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Total Pages : 276
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781438484815
ISBN-13 : 143848481X
Rating : 4/5 (15 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity by : Sherrow O. Pinder

Download or read book Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity written by Sherrow O. Pinder and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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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