Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

By Sherrow O. Pinder

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1438484801
• ISBN13: 9781438484808
• Release Date: January 2022
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher