Uri McMillans Embodied Avatars is a masterfully multilayered exposition of black womens performance art from the nineteenth century to the present. McMillan not only centers black women within traditional and feminist performance art, but also challenges black hegemonic ideas about objectification in performance.
AlthoughEmbodied Avatarsis an art historical text, the author displays an admirable dexterity across discipline and epistemologies: the mixture of art history, disability studies, object-oriented ontology, and discourses of black subjectivity is deft and, at times, dazzling.
Nicole R. Fleetwood,author of Troubling Vision:
Uri McMillan takes us on a journey to unexpected terrain. With powerful alchemy, he reveals how black women performance artists work on multiple registersthrough seduction, trickery, the comfort of the seemingly familiarto enact possibility, or what he theorizes as performance & in the service of a certain type of freedom. Meticulously researched and rigorously theorized, Embodied Avatarsis a model of interdisciplinary scholarship grounded in archival work and impressive textual analysis. This book is certain to forge new paths of inquiry and debate in performance, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Stephanie Leigh Batiste,author of Darkening Mirrors:
Embodied Avatarspresents a sweeping and charismatic investigation of the ways in which Black women have strategically staged versions of 'themselves as modes of public, personal, and critical performance and as interventions in art, expression, identity, identification, and freedom.This vibrant and energetic study of art, performance, and embodiment is far-reaching, profound, lively, and engaging.
Robin D. G. Kelley,author of Thelonious Monk:
Roll over Joseph Beuys, tell Yves Klein the news! Embodied Avatarsradically disrupts prevailing histories, definitions, and genealogies of performance art by focusing on black women who, over the course of two centuries, sought to turn their degraded bodies into dissident tools of emancipation and social critique. Recognizing the first modern stage of black performativity as the auction block, Uri McMillan reveals how black women turned objectification into objecthood, enabling them to remake, disguise, remold the self into an object of resistance, an embodied nightmare to the American dream. Full of eye-popping analytical turns and thrilling theoretical high wire acts, this book is both brilliant scholarship and a performance to be reckoned with.
Embodied Avatarsdestabilizes the boundaries between art, objecthood, and survival within the last two centuries [....] Readers are left with the reverberating echoes of not only the black women artists profiled, but the resonances of their multiple avatars, becoming a fierce atonal chorus. Performing objecthood becomes a transformative human strategy in the face of searing dehumanization. Rather than arguing for another iteration of the human as a salvageable category, McMillans innovative scholarship illuminates a complex and obstinate way of being, a being that strikingly prefers not to.
Uri McMillan's magisterial debut book engages while naming a two-century-long tradition of black women's performance art in the United States...Part of the greatness of this book is its complicated engagement with racialized, gendered, and sexualized objecthood as method, the risk-taking practices whereby the historically unfree recalculate the possibilities objecthood for smuggling in liberatory alternatives.
Uri McMillans magisterial debut book engages while naming a two-century-long tradition of black womens performance art in the United States, intervening in the problematic racialization and gendering of particular art historical traditions buttressed by the presumed absence of black womens aesthetic and political enactments.
