Book Review: Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance by Uri McMillan

Abstract

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.