Description
The renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic brilliantly unravels the complexities of one of the most enigmatic figures of our time in this passionate, incisive, and bracing work of cultural analysis.
Who is Michael Jackson and what does it mean to call him a "What Is It"? What do P. T. Barnum, Peter Pan, and Edgar Allan Poe have to do with our fascination with Jackson? How did his curious Victorian upbringing and his tenure as a child prodigy on the "chitlin' circuit" inform his character and multiplicity of selves? How is Michael Jackson's celebrity related to the outrageous popularity of nineteenth-century minstrelsy? What is the perverse appeal of child stars for grown-ups and what is the price of such stardom for these children and for us? What uncanniness provoked Michael Jackson to become "Alone of All His Race, Alone of All Her Sex," while establishing himself as an undeniably great performer with neo-Gothic, dandy proclivities and a producer of visionary music videos? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson's presumed monstrosity? In short, how are we all of us implicated?
Author: Margo Jefferson
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/09/2007
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.29w x 0.42d
ISBN13: 9780307277657
ISBN10: 0307277658
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Music
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | General
- Biography & Autobiography | Rich & Famous
About the Author
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.