SUNY series in African American Studies

Sherrow O. Pinder

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484815
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Epigrammatic Layout of the Argument
• Chapter 1 Conceptual Framework
• Chapter 2 Blackness and a Black Identity
• Chapter 3 Michael Jackson and Racial Identification
• Chapter 4 Michael Jackson’s Nonconformity and Its Consequences
• Epilogue: Reflections
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover