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Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

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.

ISBN-13: 9781479811212

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 01-10-2023

Pages: 280

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Series: Minoritarian Aesthetics #1

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.