Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression

by Tina Post

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 2023

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is challenging and exciting and extraordinarily productive. Post asks us to see various performances and cultural products that we've seen many times in new ways and asks us to think differently about those performances, sculptures, photographs and other artifacts as performing a particular kind of black refusal. This is a fascinating, beautifully written, and fun-to-read book, most especially because of the range of objects Posts reads for us and her camaraderie with the reader. I especially love the way Deadpan makes sense of Young Jean Lee's The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Neighbors, and her reading of the work of Buster Keaton is truly brilliant..

But I want, especially, to underline Post's commitment to pushing on some of the shibboleths of the discipline of performance studies. In Deadpan Post offers descriptions of performances that do not change the world, that are not activist per se, and that do not necessarily subvert or overturn mainstream society. Instead, Post tries throughout the book to pay close attention to performances and activities that get by, that deflect, that make things work, that survive. I feel like this is an entirely new front in performance studies that Post and others in the field are attempting to work on at just this moment, and it seems to me a most interesting, fruitful place to be working.

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hoping class discussion will make this clearer to me!

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to hear Dr Post give a lecture and question series at my uni this past March. By far one of the most fascinating and important pieces of non fiction literature I have ever read-- I cannot stress how striking this text is.