This article argues that the ethical potential of “the nonhuman turn” advanced by the new materialisms is structured by disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh. The most recent new materialist publications draw upon the techno-scientific developments of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by the cumulative effects of species-level human activity, to demonstrate the supposed inadequacy of poststructuralist “identity politics” for meeting the intellectual challenges of our time. But as a close reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable duology reveals, any model of ethics that dismisses considerations of race as such, and attention to the history of racial slavery in particular, will fail to address the most fundamental questions, ethical and otherwise, of the modern world.
In a political climate marked by increased engagement with the forms of violence that accrue to blackness in the modern world, Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars reclaims the performance of objecthood as a metamorphic strategy of black women's artwork. McMillan ranges across performance studies, art history, object theory and black studies to investigate how the wielding of objecthood can disrupt racialised and gendered narratives inscribed onto black bodies. As he notes, this is a risky endeavour, considering that racial slavery and its afterlives depend on the reduction of black bodies to less-thanhuman objects. It is against this horizon that McMillan asks, 'What happens … if we reimagine black objecthood as a way toward agency rather than its antithesis' (p. 9)? Through close scrutiny of black performance artists Joice Heith, Ellen Craft, Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell, Embodied Avatars explores how a radical and voluntary inhabitation of objecthood might (temporarily) dislocate this condition from the violent circumstances of its formation.
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