Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

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 deadpana vaudeville term meaning dead faceacross 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 blacknesss deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lees The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss Neighbors, as well as Buster Keatons signature character and Steve McQueens restitution of the formers 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.