Full Description
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 on 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 structures 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.
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
