#WhatDigitalHumanitiesLookLike: Reimagining Michael Jackson’s Scream for #BlackLivesMatter

So of course the first question is why a course on Michael Jackson–and why  at this time?  Why not a course on Jackson?…a course that uses his body of work and his literal body as a vessel to explore the anxieties, fears, apprehensions and violence produce by the centuries old presence of people of African descent in the United States?

For this particular iteration of the course, we looked at Michael Jackson’s relationship to the Archive(s) – do a quick Google search on Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, who died almost 70 years before the advent of YouTube, for example.  For their final projects, the students–in 8 groups of 7–were assigned a particular track from Jackson’s catalogue, and charged to curate uploadable digital content, that addresses many of the course’s most prominent themes: race, gender (performance), class, cultural appropriation, and the function and value of the archive(s).

Presented here is one such project, which reimagines Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson’s “Scream” for the #BlackLivesMatter moment, foregrounding it in a significant moment in Duke’s own history of racial politics.

This is #WhatDigitalHumanitiesLookLike.

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