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Michael Jackson and Afrofuturism:

HIStory’s Adaptation of Past,
Present, and Future
Erik Steinskog

In his eulogy for Michael Jackson in the Village Voice on 1 July 2009,
Greg Tate wrote: ‘I have always wanted to believe that Michael was actu-
ally one of the most secretly angry Black race-men on the planet’ (p. 14).
This wish may appear paradoxical, both in contrast to music often seen as
more explicitly political – from soul in the 1960s to hip hop in the early
1990s – but also in relation to the wider cultural reception of Michael
Jackson. A closer look at the oeuvre of the King of Pop, however, reveals
multiple intersections of commercial popular music on the one hand
and political questions on the other, and arguably nowhere as clearly as
in his music videos.
In this chapter, I will focus on Jackson’s 1995 album HIStory: Past,
Present and Future, Book 1, a double CD that combined a greatest hits
album with new material. The theoretical framework for my reading
is taken both from discourses on the politics of race and from the field
of Afrofuturism, both of which are adapted by Jackson in complex
and sometimes contradictory ways. I will argue that Michael Jackson’s
adaptation of a wide range of racialized identities and temporalities
makes some of his work highly relevant to discussions of Afrofuturism.
Bringing aspects of Michael Jackson’s cross-media work into dialogue
with this developing perspective will give new insights into some of the
key contradictions that make him such an enduring popular icon.

‘Black to the Future’: race, sci-fi, and Afrofuturism

Since Mark Dery coined the term ‘Afrofuturism’ in 1993, this field has
been emerging across disciplines in discussing African-American culture,

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
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though its focus was for a long time primarily on more avant-garde
forms of music. As Marlo David argues in ‘Afrofuturism and Post-Soul
Possibilities in Black Popular Music’ (2007), there has been a tendency
within Afrofuturist discourse – her example is Kodwo Eshun – to ‘explore
black Atlantic experience and, by extension, a number of radical black
music styles – electronic music and experimental jazz, for example,’
with the result that it ‘typically leaves mainstream black music behind’
(David, 2007, p. 696). Jason King raised a similar concern, in a remark
quoted by Nabeel Zuberi in his article ‘Is This The Future? Black Music
and Technology Discourse’:

The Afrofuturism canon of techno and hip hop is also selectively

male and heterosexist. It prefers music without vocals and ignores
recording artists such as Earth Wind & Fire, The Undisputed Truth,
Missy Elliott, Labelle, and Sylvester. R & B, soul, disco, and house
music with female and transgender voices have also drawn on the
tropes of sf in their work. (Zuberi, 2007, p. 290)

Since the first discussions of Afrofuturism, this discussion has been

broadened to include more mainstream acts, as testified to in Ytasha
L. Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
(2013). Expanding the Afrofuturist discourse through the addition of
more mainstream music will obviously change it, but this expansion
is arguably inherent in the original definition of the discourse itself.
In Dery’s article ‘Black to the Future’ relations to history are crucial,
opening with a quotation from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
(first published in 1949) about history and its different modalities:

If all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and
became truth. ‘Who control the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls
the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ (Orwell,
2003, p. 40)

Dery’s title plays on Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 movie Back to the Future,
where Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) is taken back to before he
was born, meets his parents, and ‘invents’ rock ‘n’ roll music. As with
Afrofuturist discourse, the film’s plot similarly hinges on a re-imagination
of the relation between past, present, and future. Dery’s title adds a racial
dimension to this, thereby pointing to race as an important category for
thinking through time and history and towards what could be said to
be a blind spot for blackness in much of history and historiography. The