Awards
- Short-listed for The PROSE Award 2023 (UK)
Overview
Finalist: PROSE Awards 2023 – Media and Cultural Studies Michael Jackson died in 2009, but he has never really left us and there are no signs he ever will. A globally acclaimed child star in the 1970s, the world’s premier entertainer in the final decades of the 20th century, a perplexingly odd character in the 21st century, Jackson defied every known category and became borderline incomprehensible. To remedy this, in The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Ellis Cashmore reflects the restless, unorthodox and mysterious life Jackson led in order to understand more about him as well as his cultural impact. Exploring how Jackson emerged from the post-civil rights era when America was searching for someone who symbolized a new age as it struggled to unburden itself of racial inequality, Cashmore’s book is the first to examine Jackson’s career through the prisms of American racial politics and celebrity culture. Uniquely structured, beginning in the present and journeying back to Jackson’s birth, The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson will excite and enliven debates on this controversial figure, one that very much continues to remain embedded within our culture.
Full Product Details
Author: Ellis Cashmore (Professor of Culture, Media and Sport, Aston University, UK)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions:
Width: 23.20cm
, Height: 3.60cm
, Length: 16.40cm
Weight: 0.720kg
ISBN: 9781501363580
ISBN 10: 1501363581
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 16 June 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
As innovative, entertaining, and slyly subversive as its subject was at his peak, Ellis Cashmore's vibrant and challenging counter-clock world examination of Michael Jackson prompts us to reconsider the relationship between Jackson the icon and Jackson the abuser: it is no less than a Time's Arrow for the former King of Pop. --Joe Street, Associate Professor in History, Northumbria University, UK
As innovative, entertaining, and slyly subversive as its subject was at his peak, Ellis Cashmore's vibrant and challenging counter-clock world examination of Michael Jackson prompts us to reconsider the relationship between Jackson the icon and Jackson the abuser: it is no less than a Time's Arrow for the former King of Pop. --Joe Street, Associate Professor in History, Northumbria University, UK The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson can hardly be classified as a biography, though it does trace the events in Jackson's life. Rather, Cashmore uses the pop star as a prismatic lens through which readers can consider how popular music, race, and celebrity intersect to produce the multiple, conflicting and still-emergent meanings of Jackson and his legacy. This innovative, gripping reverse genealogy prompts a profound rethinking of how we come to sanctify, abhor, and retell the life stories of global icons like Jackson. --Lindsay Bernhagen, Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies and Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, USA
Author Information
Ellis Cashmore is the author of Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption (2017) and Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America (2012), both published by Bloomsbury. A third edition of his Celebrity Culture is forthcoming. He has held positions in sociology at the universities of Hong Kong and Tampa, USA and is currently an honorary professor at Aston University, UK.
