| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFAM 113 | MICHAEL JACKSON | ENG-WILMOT, G. | Michael Jackson: Popular Media and Cultural History Since Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, the King of Pop remains a loaded figure. At once revered as a multifaceted performer yet still a cipher upon which ideas (and anxieties) about race, gender and sexuality are projected. This course looks back at some of his creative efforts against their context of the late 20th century in order to ask: How might we better understand the cultural dynamics of recent history through the audiovisual output of one of the biggest pop figures of the time? The focus is on the period in which Jackson achieved his greatest solo success—the late 1970s to the early 1990s—a stint shadowed by speculations about his skin color, bodily appearance and alleged sexual proclivities. This span was host to a spectrum of contradictory phenomena in America: an ascendant neoconservative political agenda; a growing multiculturalism movement; the hypervisibility of superstar black celebrities; and the precipitous rise in violence, mass incarceration, and crack cocaine faced by urban black communities; to name just a few. The dynamics of all these events were entangled with competing ideas about how difference in its various forms was lived and represented in America. This course attends to Jackson’s work as symptomatic of this backdrop, the histories of which have yet to be fully written. In conjunction with reading key texts from the growing body of scholarship on Jackson, this course requires close listening and viewing of albums, singles, short films and music videos—all with an ear and eye on how such works reflect and critique dominant cultural discourses. We will consider how notions of race and, to an extent gender and sexuality, were being consolidated, contested, and lived during this period. |