Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization

by Judith Hamera

Overview

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? Who represents hope? Who are the cautionary tales? Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, and specifically apart from images of, and works by and about African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. It insists that Michael Jackson's performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the city's postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly about the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid 1980s and 2016. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of deindustrialization, how it operates as a structure of feeling and as representations as well as a shift in the dominant mode of production, and how industrialization's successor mode, financialization, uses imagery both very similar to and very different from its predecessor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190699727
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/02/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Judith Hamera is Professor of Dance in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, with affiliations in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Urban Studies, Princeton University. She is the author of Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (2007).

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction: "Never Can Say Goodbye": U.S. Deindustrialization as Unfinished Business Part I: Michael Jackson's Spectacular Deindustriality Chapter One The Labors of Michael Jackson: Transitional Deindustriality, Dance, and Virtuous(o) Work Chapter Two Consuming Passions, Wasted Efforts: Michael Jackson's Financial(-ized) Melodramas Part II: Detroit's Deindustrial Homeplaces Chapter Three Combustible Hopes on the National State: Figuring Race, Work, and Home in "not necessarily") Detroit Chapter Four Up From the Ashes: Art in Detroit's Emerging Phoenix Narrative Coda Still Unfinished . . . . References Index