The Syllabus: Michael Jackson + Prince + Blackness in the 1980s

Michael Jackson + Prince & Blackness in the 1980s #DukeMJPrince    Duke University | Fall Semester 2017Tuesday @ 6:15pm – 8:45pm | White Lecture Hall (107)Duke East Campus    Professor:Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. Twitter: @NewBlackMan | IG: @BookerBBBrown   
Course Description
Prince Rogers Nelson and Michael Joseph Jackson were born two months apart in the summer of 1958 -- three years after the landmark Brown vs. The Board of Education (Topeka, KS) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and five years before the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Nelson and Jackson grew up in their respective mid-western cities, in part because of the social conditions of Jim Crow segregation and industrial job opportunities in the region, that were the very inspirations for the activist moments that they were born into.  As they ascended to the peak of their professions as recording artists and entertainers in the 1980s -- alongside others such as Whitney Houston, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jordan-- they were held up by an admiring multiracial public as evidence of the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the possibility of post-racial futures. But at what cost?  What was the price of Blackness? How did their ascent challenge conventional thought regarding the performance of Black masculinity and American masculinity writ-large? How was their ascendance tied to the production of Black hypervisibility -- normative to anyone born in the next generation -- and to what ends was this hypervisibility of value, and to whom -- this in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency? These and many other questions will serve as the basis for “Michael Jackson + Prince + and Blackness in the 1980s.”
Books    Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture 1890-1930 | 
ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage The Death of Rhythm & Blues | Nelson GeorgeRevolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power | Christine AchamOn Michael Jackson | Margo JeffersonDig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince | Ben Greenman
I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon | toure Michael Jackson, Inc.: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire | Zack Greenburg