Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Winner of the 2023 ASAP Book Prize, given by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production
Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan--a vaudeville term meaning "dead face"--across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life.
Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness's deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee's The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton's signature character and Steve McQueen's restitution of the former's legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production.
Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.
we were also delighted to be joined by Tina Post, who shared insights from her recent book "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression" https://t.co/XZwlPSEGdA
We cannot avoid our grief and be free. Sr. Poetry Editor @raisingmothers - Founder @blackmermaids 🎬 Grief is the Glitch (2022)
My tbr pile on Black feeling, emotion, and expression. She Is Weeping... - Dannelle Gutarra Cordero Notes From The Laughing Barrel - A'Driane Nieves https://t.co/cgjzM2pLFg Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression - Tina Post Feelin... - Bettina Judd @bettinajudd https://t.co/iC3lWo3LbP
In this startlingly original, theoretically nuanced, wide-ranging exploration of inexpressiveness
as an underexamined performance repertoire in Black arts and culture, Tina Post makes a
landmark contribution to the field of race and aesthetics. Deadpan explores the fine structure of a
rhetorically intricate aesthetic technique as malleable in its uses as affect itself, and it does so
with remarkable wit and precision.
A stellar study filled with dazzling prose, poignant persuasion, ethical intervention, and
intellectual adventure. While dominant US culture regards blackness as hyper-expressive,
melodramatic, and spectacular, Tina Post carefully directs our attention to the subtle and
sometimes inscrutable art of black inexpression. Across a sweeping repertoire--from nineteenth-
century daguerreotypes to twentieth-century avant-garde performance to twenty-first century
memes and beyond--she affirms 'illegibility's efficacy for the black subject.' She knows and
shows that expressionlessness has been vital to black aesthetics, resistance, refusal, self-defense,
self-making, and world-making. As I read about deadpan, my own face was anything but: Post's
arresting arguments and gorgeous sentences made my black visage light up with intrigue,
wonder, and delight.