Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

Michael Jackson challenged the power structure of the American music industry and struck at the heart of blackface minstrelsy, America’s first form of mass entertainment. The response was a derisive caricature that over time Jackson subverted through his art.

In this expanded, all-new edition, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask argues for the tangible relationship between Jackson and blackface minstrelsy. It reveals the dialogue at minstrelsy’s 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. Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask explores Jackson’s early talent and fame and the birth and escalation of ‘Wacko Jacko’. In relation to all this, the book examines Jackson’s dynamic art as it evolved, from his live performances and short films to the very surface of his own body.

Scholarly and interdisciplinary, this work is suitable for readers across a diverse spectrum of academic fields, including African American studies, popular music studies and cultural theory, media and communication, gender studies and performance and theatre studies. Academic but accessible, this book will also be an engaging read for anyone interested in Michael Jackson and especially in his role as an icon of difference, in America’s dynamics of race and his mass media image.

"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 Jackson’s 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 Jackson’s 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

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

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