Michael Jackson remains one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century, yet his work has rarely been approached through sustained formal and art-historical analysis. Scholarship has tended to orbit biography, scandal, or cultural defence, leaving the work’s aesthetic intelligence under-examined.
This call invites contributions that approach Jackson form-first: as a unified aesthetic system integrating sound, image, movement, cinema, costume, and myth. We seek essays that situate Jackson within artistic lineages, classical, modern, diasporic, and global, and that examine how his work reshaped visual music, performance, and mass media.
Rather than adjudicating biography, contributors are encouraged to analyse how meaning is produced through form, structure, discipline, and reception history. Allegations, media controversy, and moral panic may be addressed only insofar as they function as reception frameworks, not explanatory foundations.
Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):
- Jackson’s short films as art objects and cinematic forms
- The body as medium: choreography, discipline, and vulnerability
- Black classicism and global visual culture
- Sound, image synthesis and the grammar of visual music
- Scandal as reception history and interpretive distortion
- Lineage: Jackson in dialogue with classical, modern, and diasporic traditions
We welcome submissions from art history, visual culture, musicology, dance studies, film theory, and related fields. Contributions must be grounded in close formal analysis of Jackson’s work.
Claims about meaning, identity, psychology, or cultural significance should arise from demonstrable aesthetic structures (choreography, montage, musical form, visual composition, costuming, spatial design) rather than speculative biographical or symbolic interpretation. Essays should foreground analysis over advocacy and demonstrate methodological rigour.