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Book Cover for: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, Tina Post

Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

Tina Post

Winner:National Book Critics Circle Award -Criticism (2023)

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New York University Press
  • Publish Date: Jan 10th, 2023
  • Pages: 280
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.00in - 1.00in - 0.97lb
  • EAN: 9781479811212
  • Categories: PerformanceBlack Studies (Global)Race & Ethnic Relations

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About the Author

Post, Tina: - Tina Post is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Praise for this book

"

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.

"-- "Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form"
"

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.

"-- "La Marr Jurelle Bruce, author of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity"
"Tina Post's Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression reconsiders the historical legacy of the concept outside of traditional accounts of comedy and humor studies by offering an impressive "investigation of the aesthetic affects at work at the intersection of blackness and embodied inexpressions"... the study provides an intelligent contribution to the strands of literature on black performance studies, humor studies, and visual studies at large."-- "Film Quarterly"