Agency and Self-Volition in Black Feminist Performance Art

Agency is a particularly ambiguous concept for black people, considering the history of their bodies as commodities and as signatures for exploitable flesh. The relationship between violent coercion and self-governance is difficult to calibrate. Subjectivity and the possibility of some forms of sovereignty are key focuses in studies of performance, as scholars measure the balance between coercion and consent, and develop differing assessments of self-volition. Performance art proves to be a particularly powerful site around which to articulate these theories. For example, in Disidentifications (1999) José Muñoz explored the works of a selection of contemporary queer of color performance artists and developed his concept of disidentification—the performance of both estrangement from and embrace of particularly fraught subject positions. Looking at nineteenth-century performance in Bodies in Dissent (2006), Daphne Brooks aimed to find that sweet spot between objectification and self-definition with her concepts of dissent and Afro-alienation. In Babylon Girls (2008), my study of black women on the variety stage, I explored the concepts of malleability and multi-signification, the supple transformations and manipulations of self, valenced in relationship to various audiences. Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection (2010) put forth the trope of abjection as a potent form of self-possession.

In his study of black women’s performance artistry, McMillan enters the conversation with new vigor. He works to give us a new language to navigate a range of performance strategies, from the freak show stage to the high-art world to the hip-hop video screen. His theories of agency cluster around his use of the terms objecthood and avatar (7). Considering black women performers from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, McMillan shows how these performers play with, thwart, and manipulate processes of objectification. “Wielding their bodies as pliable matter,” he writes, “the black women performers . . . repeatedly become objects, often in the form of simulated beings or what I term ‘avatars’ ” (7). These avatars are the product of the ways in which the performers have shaped the aesthetics of self-objectification, and therein lies agency. “What happens . . . if we reimagine black objecthood as a way toward agency rather than its antithesis, as a strategy rather than simply a primal site of injury?” he asks (9). McMillan takes these avatars as objects, as he plays with the trope of the black body as thing. Objects are stilled and static notions of blackness, rather than subject positions. Rather than fight for recognition as whole subjects, with interiority, these performers manipulate the “thingification” of themselves. Avatars move and transmogrify, despite the ossifying surveillance of dominant cultural formations.

McMillan’s work puts pressure on the artistic category of performance art, not just by adding black women performers to an existing pantheon, but by insisting that their work forces us to rethink the contours of the field. In posing a new genealogy, McMillan moves artfully from nineteenth-century examples of women on display, focusing on the example of Joice Heth, and in disguise, as in the case of Ellen Craft, to twentieth-century examples of black women’s performance art, from the avant-garde works of Adrian Piper to the vernacular and popular performances of Nicki Minaj. He suggests less a direct lineage than a new way to analyze the paradoxes of black women’s public appearances, which, because of their status under racist regimes as both sexualized commodity and subhuman animal, are at once hypervisible, invisible, and underrated in their complexity.

In the book’s first section, McMillan recovers the little-remembered case of Joice Heth, displayed by P. T. Barnum as George Washington’s nurse-maid both before and after her death. The violent and exploitative nature of her handling—Barnum admits to extracting her teeth, and her heart was dissected postmortem—make it difficult to discern any agency or resistance on her part. McMillan finds traces of such self-assertion in a third-party report of Heth’s exclamatory remarks. The story of the pliant and...