The Labors of Michael Jackson

Chapter 1 establishes Michael Jackson’s deindustriality, which is too frequently ignored in favor of white artists like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or Bruce Springsteen. Jackson is the exemplary transitional subject of the deindustrial; his popularity peaked as manufacturing sector contractions became increasingly visible as national problems. His racial assertiveness and virtuosic dancing marked his own extraordinary social mobility while conjuring an industrial imaginary that was both fictively racially inclusive and apparently in the process of collapsing. Jackson simultaneously incarnated the trope of the human motor—one of the defining figures of industrial modernity—and offered a compelling, cruelly optimistic spectacle of the exceptional individual’s ability to glide away from this collapse with pleasure, precision, and hard work. The chapter also offers a theory of virtuosity as a relational process linking performers to audiences and, in Jackson’s case, accounting for his status as an icon of deindustrial mobility.