Who is Michael Jackson? 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 19th-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 provoked Michael Jackson to become arguably the oddest superstar of all time? What do we find so unnerving about Michael Jackson’s presumed monstrosity? In short, how are all of us implicated?
Margo Jefferson gives us the incontrovertible lowdown on the outlandish and outrageous Michael Jackson. She offers a powerful reckoning with a quintessential, richly allusive signifier of American society and popular culture.
Margo Jefferson has written for The New York Times since 1993 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Nation, Vogue, and The Village Voice.
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