In Embodied Avatars, Uri McMillan zeroes in on a counterintuitive claim: by performing objecthood—or transforming themselves into art objects —black women preserved their subjectivity. Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, he contends that black women performers practiced a purposeful self-objectification that raises new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers’ ski ... More

In Embodied Avatars, Uri McMillan zeroes in on a counterintuitive claim: by performing objecthood—or transforming themselves into art objects —black women preserved their subjectivity. Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, he contends that black women performers practiced a purposeful self-objectification that raises new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers’ skillful manipulation of synthetic selves and adroit projection of their performances into other representational mediums. A bold rethinking of performance art, with black women at its center, Embodied Avatars analyzes daring and dazzling performances of alterity staged by “ancient negress” Joice Heth and fugitive slave Ellen Craft, seminal artists Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell, and contemporary visual and music artists Simone Leigh and Nicki Minaj. Fusing performance studies with literary analysis and visual culture studies, McMillan offers astute readings of performances staged in theatrical and quotidian locales, from freak shows to the streets of 1970s New York; in literary texts, from artists’ writings to slave narratives; and in visual and digital mediums, including engravings, photography, and video art. Throughout, McMillan reveals how these performers manipulated the triumvirate of objecthood, black performance art, and avatars a powerful mode of re-scripting their bodies, and its perception by others, while enacting artful forms of social misbehavior.