Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity (SUNY series in African American Studies)

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. Contents 8 Introduction: The Epigrammatic Layout of the Argument 10 The Extent and Organization of the Book 14 Chapter 1 Conceptual Framework 22 Chapter 2 Blackness and a Black Identity 46 The Construction of Blackness and Its Implication for a Black Identity 54 Blackness and Its Problematics 63 What Is at Stake for Blacks? 66 Chapter 3 Michael Jackson and Racial Identification 72 Jackson and Self-Fashioning 79 Michael Jackson’s Otherness of the “Other” and Its Problematics 96 Chapter 4 Michael Jackson’s Nonconformity and Its Consequences 100 Michael Jackson and “Weirdness” or “Freakiness” 108 The Disciplining and “Normalizing” of Michael Jackson 115 Epilogue: Reflections 124 Notes 140 References 200 Index 220