How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? How are these trends represented in movement, in performance, and in culture? Looking at Detroit's postindustrial revitalization, The Heidelberg Project, and Michael Jackson's many performances, Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be separated from issues of race, specifically from choreographed movements of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. Presenting Jackson and Detroit as material entities with specific histories and as representations with uncanny persistence, the book divulges invaluable lessons on 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 these economic changes, how they operate as structures of feeling and representations as well as shifts 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.

About the Author
Judith Hamera is Professor of Dance in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, with affiliations in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Urban Studies, Princeton University. She is the author of Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (2007).

Reviews
Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization, is an absorbing and multi-faceted work... * Laura Robinson, Dance Research Journal *
This book is an essential read for scholars, economists, and performance makers. Its ability to contextualize economic patterns through the lens of performance studies underscores the significance of intersectional studies. In doing so, it reminds readers of the complex economic systems at play and the unfinished business that has yet to be done when "enough" is just an illusion. * Leilia Mire, Thinking Dance *
A profoundly necessary and absorbing book. * Text and Performance Quarterly *
Indeed, Unfinished Business is an urgent read for scholars already steeped in literature concerning performance and political economy, as well as for those who might be newly alerted to the work that remains to be done. * Patrick McKelvey, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre *
This book is an insightful analysis of deindustrialization with a Detroit perspective ... Recommended. Graduate students through faculty. * Choice *


Awards
Winner of Joint Winner of the 2020 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research Winner of the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research.



Book Information
ISBN 9780199348596
Author Judith Hamera
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 431g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 18mm