Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization, is an absorbing and multifaceted work that explores the intersections between American deindustrialization, racialized global capital, and the relationship between race and place through the figural and material entities of Michael Jackson and the US city of Detroit, Michigan. Judith Hamera argues that American deindustrialization can be read as a racialized period of structural economic change and can be witnessed within “figural economies” (4) presented as material conditions, figures, individuals, and/or places. In the case of Unfinished Business, these figural signifiers include the multiple manifestations of the singer Michael Jackson, theatrical plays based on (or not based on) the city of Detroit, and Detroit's large-scale public art projects. While performed against the backdrop of sweeping economic change and racial injustice in the United States, Hamera's work speaks globally to the lessons that can be derived from political economic history, to how structural changes impact public and cultural lives, and to the continuous interplay between racism and capitalism.

Hamera's interdisciplinary approach draws upon economic theory and performance studies—two areas that have often remained separate but, as this book demonstrates, are vital in revealing the lived experiences of racialized labor and deindustrial decline, commencing with the Regan era and continuing through until 2016. The dense archival research carried out on the ambitious number of material and conceptual examples covered within the text speaks to the richness and complexity of the topics at hand, yet Hamera's careful weaving of performance analysis, historical events, and theoretical underpinnings allows the content to remains accessible and robust.

Unfinished Business is split into two parts; the first tackling the spectacular deindustriality of Michael Jackson, and the second focusing on the deindustrial homeplaces of Detroit. Rather than a book of two halves, Hamera enables the reader to draw the threads between the parts in her analysis of their relationship to structural economic change, capital, memory and nostalgia, spatio-racial environments, and capitalism, with the coda starkly linking these ideas to the current Trump administration. Part 1 focuses on the figural potential of Michael Jackson and his three-decade career that traces the economic shifts of industrialization, deindustrialization, and financialization in the United States. After correcting Jackson's invisibility as a figure of American deindustrialization, Hamera's close analysis of his iconic 1980s performances, interspersed with historical accounts surrounding the dwindling U.S. Steel industry, reveals the conditions and effects of racialized labor, and positions Jackson as a “transitional subject”—a virtuosic “human motor” (25) who both exemplifies the spectacular while also evoking a nostalgia for the vanishing industrial past. Dance scholars in particular will appreciate the close critical reading of his performances, as despite the wide breadth of works written on his performance career and lifestyle, his dancing is often consumed rather than critiqued. During the period of 2002–2014, described as the “neverland phase of his career” (55), Hamera reveals Jackson as a cautionary tale, shifting from the spectacular industrial figure of early deindustrialization, to a character embroiled in economies of consumption, debt, moral controversy, and austerity. Analyzing events as melodrama, she focuses on key moments in the demise of Jackson: his extreme consumption and credit intoxication witnessed in his interview with British journalist Martin Bashir during a Las Vegas shopping spree; his plea of fiscal innocence as constructed by the defense during his molestation trial in 2005; and his performance of austerity and exhaustion in the rehearsals for the This is It tour leading up to his death in 2009. Situated among the neoliberal political climate and the eventual subprime crisis and financial crash of 2007, Jackson's journey from financial squander to redemption makes him “financialization's exemplary entrepreneurial subject” (102). Where this section particularly succeeds is in its argument that economic shifts are highly racialized projects. Through examples of deindustrialization and financialization, Black African Americans are depicted through mainstream press and governing structures as extreme consumers and dependent on public funds—a politicized deflection from structural inequalities, unequal distribution, and the continuation of the Anti-Uncle Tom rhetoric.

Part 2 shifts focus to the figural potential of the city of Detroit. Hamera begins by analyzing three New York productions inspired by the representative potential of the city, and whose release coincides with its decent into bankruptcy: D'Amour's Detroit (2011), Berry Gordy's Motown the Musical (2013), and Dominique Morisseau's Detroit’ 67 (2013). Hamera draws upon the process of ‘“re-sitting/re-citing” (107) in order for readers to make their own sense of the city's history and the representational impact of Detroit-as-figure. She argues that over the three-decade long deindustrial decline of the city, Detroit's spatio-racial environments have come to represent “nostalgic melancholy” and “willful amnesia” (106) of racialized deindustrialization. The historical narratives of Detroit/Detroit-as-figure are explored through all of the play's narratives, although importantly they are not always explicitly remembered or referenced. Themes of the domestic home, work, place, and race are entangled with the decline of Ford Motors and their highly racialized “build a better worker” scheme, the city's Motown legacy, the 1967 riots between African American neighborhoods and police, and the spectacles of combustion witnessed on the 30th of October's Devil's Night—an evening during which widespread arson and vandalism would occur across Detroit between the 1970s and the 1990s.

The final chapter remains in Detroit but shifts its focus to its “phoenix-like” (147) postindustrial renewal and urban planning between 2012–2016, and the immersive art installations of Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project (1988–ongoing) and Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead (2010–ongoing). Rather than accepting the “color-blind renewal” (147) of the artistic movement, Hamera exposes the invisibility of African Americans within this narrative, and how art and capital operate in terms of the city's redevelopment, urban planning, and investment. Alongside her initial context of the role of the Detroit Institute of Arts in the city's bankruptcy deal, the chapter excels in its critical analysis of the reclaimed home immersive art installations of Guyton and Kelley. Using Bertolt Brecht's theorization of the gest, she argues that these works operate against the grain of artist-led gentrification of the city, and instead speak to the deindustrial history of the city “as a highly racialized transitional phase within modern capitalism” (148). She terms these works as “gestic art”—an acknowledgement of their ability to materialize their comparative and historical significance, pulling together aesthetics, location, and racial dynamics. In particular, her analysis of Guyton's reworking of his houses following arson attacks, reveals adaption from deindustrial destruction, without the need to erase, abandon, or displace its land or people.

Overall, where Unfinished Business excels is in its revelation of hierarchies of race and racialized structural economies. Through her examples, Hamera unpacks the complex economics of racialized labor, economic inequalities, land grabbing, and gentrification, and gives voice to the African-American communities who have been silenced. Consequently, this text is suited to postgraduate students and scholars across disciplines, but especially to performance scholars and economic theorists who are interested in the intersections between performance, politics, economics, and race. As Hamera states in her prelude, “These lives and this work are far too slippery, and too consequential to be left only to economists” (xiv). Unfinished Business also makes a strong case for the importance of the critical humanities as a mode of enquiry into structural economic change, and how the analysis of popular performance is crucial to the understanding of cultural lives and the work of capitalism. As the cultural sector awaits the precarious futures of darkened theaters, concert halls, and performance spaces in the midst of COVID-19, global recession, and growing social unrest, Hamera's text reveals that it is the figural potential of cultural pursuits that can help us make sense of these times.