Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity

<p><b>A close examination of the complexity inherent in Michael Jackson's ambiguous racial identity.</b></p><p>In <i>Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity</i> 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.</p>