Open Cultural Studies 2017; 1: 628–645 Anna Pochmara*, Justyna Wierzchowska Nobody Knows My Name: The Masquerade of Mourning in the Early 1980s Artistic Productions of Michael Jackson and Prince https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2017-0058 Received September 15, 2017; accepted November 12, 2017 Abstract: The article analyses Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and Prince’s movie Purple Rain. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. Jackson’s and Prince’s performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father. Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson’s and Prince’s performances. Keywords: Michael Jackson, Prince, camp, black camp, Thriller, Purple Rain I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I am something you will never understand. Prince I’m a black American. I’m proud to be a black American. I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. Michael Jackson In his text on late twentieth-century black masculinity “The Gangsta and the Diva,” Andrew Ross argues that the affectless masculinity of the rapper and the excessive histrionics of the snap queen form a dialectic “response to the phenomenal social pressure exerted upon black males” and that these “theatrical versions of black masculinity are as much methods of deflecting or neutralizing white disapproval as modes of expressing black traditions” (159, 161). Among the text’s examples and six photographic illustrations of the black divas, there are Michael Jackson and Prince. In this article, we will argue that Ross’s claim that the black diva represents “a camp alchemist’s transmutation of black female assertiveness” (159) does not ideally fit Prince and Jackson as they do not draw on African American sassy femininity. When read historically, the figures of the gangsta and the diva as conceptualized by Ross are informed by the echoes of nineteenth-century Jim Crow mythology. The gangsta seems to be a contemporary variation of the black brute, mediated by the 1960s Black Power icons and 1970s blaxploitation stars, whereas, the diva feeds on Research Article Open Access. © 2017 Anna Pochmara, Justyna Wierzchowska, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. *Corresponding author: Anna Pochmara, University of Warsaw, E-mail: a.pochmara@uw.edu.pl Justyna Wierzchowska, University of Warsaw, E-mail: j.l.wierzchowska@uw.edu.pl Unauthenticated Download Date | 7/6/18 11:43 AM