Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask [Paperback]

In this expanded, all-new edition, this book argues for the tangible relationship between Jackson and blackface minstrelsy. It reveals the dialogue at minstrelsys core and, in its broader sense, tracks a centuries-long pattern of racial oppression and its resistance and how that has been played out in popular theatre.

Harriet J. Manning is Associate Researcher at Newcastle University, UK.

Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask is one of those rare works that excels on both the macro and micro level. Manning provides detailed, insightful analyses of some of Jacksons most important performances, while also skillfully placing them within American performance traditions spanning more than a century. Manning shows how those traditions have shaped the perceptions, beliefs and even the very identity of white Americans, especially, and how Jackson forcefully challenged both those misperceptions and the traditions that gave rise to them. I have a much better understanding now of blackface minstrelsy  and, more than that, of American racial history  and how the 'cacophony' surrounding Jackson fits into that.

Willa Stillwater, author of M Poetica: Michael Jacksons Art of Connection and Defiance, USA

 

The first edition was a clear leader in its field, the second revised and expanded edition is one of the finest pieces of scholarship that I have reviewed in recent years & Its history from below of the minstrelsy traditions, white and Black audiences and performers, postbellum U.S. theatre, racialization and politics and the contemporary reception of Jackson is deft, intense and revealing.

Martyn Hudson, University of Northumbria, UK

Michael Jackson challenged the power structurelcT