Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

by Tina Post

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479811212
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Series:	Minoritarian Aesthetics , #1
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	410,692
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: Some Type of Way 1

1 Subjectivity and Self-Specimenization 27

2 Minimalism and the Aesthetics of Black Threat 63

3 The Opacity Gradient 103

4 Excess and Absence (or, The Negro Believes _) 139

5 Buster Keaton's Black Deadpan 165

Coda: Steve McQueen Takes It Back 201

Acknowledgments 205

Notes 211

Bibliography 239

Index 251

About the Author 269

Color plates appear as an insert following page 130.

Editorial Reviews

"Some books achieve significance in the time they were written, some command attention after they were written, and some remain timeless... Tina Post’s book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpressions, which arrives timeously in 2022 is indeed quintessential in temporality and in the significance of Black cultural studies."

Ethnic and Third World Literatures

"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."

author of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind&# La Marr Jurelle Bruce

"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."

author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Jud Sianne Ngai

"It is in Post’s creative and heterogenous readings that the force of her argument best comes across. From the surveilled, violated, and exploited black figure (Louis Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of enslaved people); to the display of black respectability (Richard Avedon’s group portrait William Casby and family, 1963); to black refusals of photographic capture (Rashid Johnson’s Jonathan with Hands, 1997); to the work of Robert Morris, who, without consciously invoking black imagery or cultural markers, embraced an “aesthetics of looming” linked to a racialized “paradigm of black threat”; to discomfiting fusions of dramatic realism and minstrelsy (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s first play, 2010’s Neighbors); to affective indeterminacy in contemporary rap (Atlanta’s aforementioned Rich Homie Quan), Post’s readings include both “black subjects who perform expressionlessness” and white artists whose work flirts with and feeds on the imaginary of blackness."

Artforum

"The text pulses with creativity as Post locates deadpan in theater, visual and performance art, performances of the self, and more ... With the ambition of her project and immense catalog of works, Post generates momentum for further study of Black aesthetics, affect, and modes of reserve."

Black Perspectives

"It is in Post’s creative and heterogenous readings that the force of her argument best comes across... we might ask ourselves why it takes so little in this life not only to be compelled to express absence, but to want to disappear entirely."

Artforum - Tiana Reid

"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