Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance by Uri McMillan (review)

Embodied Avatars features black women who perform themselves out of their bodies and into the most surprising of creations: in one case, a disabled upper-middle–class planter named William Johnson; in another, a blaxploitationesque man called the Mythic Being. The four women who buttress each of McMillan's case studies are slippery, shapeshifting figures who make themselves anew from once subjugated identities. The author presents a compelling investigation of the ways in which black women have created avatars, or multiplicitous selves, that allow for unfettered movement otherwise impossible in their constricting worlds. Performing in their shadowy second-self skins, McMillan writes of women who maneuver and improvise, disrupt and unsettle. Impeded by racial and gendered expectations, they adorn themselves in constructed bodies, passing into new realms of possibility. They are unruly in their daring embodiments and it is this unruliness—the audacity to move toward a liberated subjectivity through dangerous performances of objecthood—that is the central force of McMillan's breathtaking analytics. The impulse for liberation, for movement toward an existence akin to freedom, links the seemingly disparate women of McMillan's debut monograph.

Although Embodied Avatars is an art historical text, the author displays an admirable dexterity across disciplines and epistemologies: the mixture of art history, disability studies, object-oriented ontology, and discourses of black subjectivity is deft and, at times, dazzling. Undergraduate students might find the epilogue, which discusses pop performer Nicki Minaj, particularly interesting whereas more advanced scholars will appreciate the author's deep intertextual engagement. McMillan proves to be an ethically minded and meticulous cultural historian as he consciously stretches received parameters of "performance art" to include historical figures from the nineteenth century. The author's critical move urges scholars to revisit and revise assumptions regarding who and what should be considered proper creators and subjects of artistic production and, moreover, displaces performance art's fabled origins. His disruptive inclusions insist that ordinary black women create art (of themselves) in their everyday lives and that their art-making practices can be marvelously performative.

Purchased for $1,000.00 by P. T. Barnum and staged as a freak-show attraction and medical spectacle in Philadelphia's Masonic Hall, Joice Heth was one of these women. McMillan argues that Heth made disruptive art of herself despite the cruelest of circumstances. Marketed as "George Washington's nursemaid" to paying white audiences, Heth was theatricalized as "the ancient negress" who, at a remarkable 161 years of age, was a biological novelty whose mode of "black performance art, staged here, was in the service of national memory" (34). In his opening chapter, McMillan employs the powerful term mammy memory to capture the affective energy of Heth's avatar, whose corporeal excesses signified "the potent sentimental link between childhood, race, and nostalgia" (26). Shaped into the essence of black motherhood in the buttressing of white American identity, McMillan skillfully illustrates the ways Heth was both rendered a cultural object of collective desire and managed small acts of defiance from that positionality of objecthood from without.

Particularly vivid within his detailed account that notes the forced extraction of her teeth, her blindness, and her near immobility due to an apparent stroke—all aspects that aided in the effectiveness of Heth's antebellum performance art—McMillan makes a necessary intervention that cuts across chapters in the burgeoning field of disability studies. In the book's second chapter, "Passing Performances: Ellen Craft's Fugitive Selves," the author implements the term prosthetic performance to account for the "protean ploys includ[ing] both repurposed objects (such as the green spectacles and two poultices Ellen wore) and embodied behaviors (feigned deafness, slowed gait, and frustrated chirography)" used in Craft's daring and crafty escape from slavery, documented in her narrative Running One Thousand Miles to Freedom (75). The author effectively traces how Craft's mimesis of a white upper-class planter traveling with his attendant (in fact, her husband) was...