Seen in the 1970s as emblematic of post-Civil Rights equality (Dyson 1993), he catapulted from the status of working-class child performer to multi-millionaire music publisher. Michael Jackson reflects and represents currents of diversity of American identity. I conclude by tracing a trajectory of his transnational appeal-leading up to his iconicity in China-and how that was reinforced by his American identity. I then discuss how Jackson both critiqued and celebrated the US’s complex racial histories in his work, particularly his lyrics. These arenas are also highly masculinized spaces, and Jackson’s diverse gender performances and multi-faceted persona help de-essentialize the heteronormative masculinities reinforced in such institutions. To do so, I first examine how his charismatic presence is invoked in central arenas of contemporary American life such as Presidential ceremonies, sports, and the military. I contend that untangling Jackson’s American iconicity-specifically, what he reflected and represented of American identity-helps us understand the roots and resilience of his global iconicity. I take up Gilroy’s call to examine the interplay of Jackson’s roots/routes and in doing so, show the ways in which his American iconicity was founded upon his multi-dimensional American identity, and fueled his global iconicity. Grasping the “politics of identity” (Appadurai 1996, 44) yields a broader anthropological understanding of the transnational flows of ideas, objects, and practices, and the fluidity of society. The workings of social categories such as gender and class also shift through routes. Routes, as much if not more than roots, allow us to see identity as “a process of movement and mediation” (Gilroy 1993, 19). He therefore claims that it is not sufficient to analyze the geographical “roots” of black identity scholars must also attend to identity’s “routes,” and the “interplay” that exists between the two (Gilroy 1993, 19).
In Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argues that identity should be understood from a transnational and intercultural perspective, beyond the stricture of the nation-state (Gilroy 1993, 19). The transatlantic African slave trade entailed an estimated 12 to 20 million West Africans forced into slavery and shipped to South, Central, and North America (Horne 2007, 2). Yet while Jackson acknowledged his ancestors’ experiences of slavery in the U.S., he also emerged from the African Diaspora’s forced migration, and thus was always already transnational. Since his 2009 death, fans have commemorated Jackson by erecting statues of him in England, China, Russia and India.
These experiences shaped his messages in songs such as “Heal the World,” “They Don’t Care About Us,” and “Earth Song” (see also Vogel 2011). Of his philanthropy Jackson commented, “I just couldn’t see myself not being touched by the things I have seen, like that village in China, and the things I have seen in Africa and Russia and Germany and Israel” (Shmuley 2009, 138).
According to the Guinness Book of Records, Jackson donated an estimated $300 million to charity in his lifetime. In 1992 he established the Heal the World foundation which airlifted 46 tons of supplies to war-torn Sarajevo. His geographic mobility developed his transnational perspective at many stops on his world tours he would also visit hospitals and orphanages to which he donated money, gifts, and resources. From Sweden to South Korea, footage from Jackson’s world tours shows fans cheering, chanting, weeping, and fainting as he performed, despite controversies surrounding him. His ability to fuse together West African, African American, and Anglo–European musical influences as well as choreography styles from the American inner city, Fred Astaire, and French mime Marcel Marceau lent Jackson’s craft a broadly inclusive appeal. Like Superman, Michael Jackson is an American icon who went global.
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