Deadpan - The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	New York University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Minoritarian Aesthetics
Release date:	December 2022
Authors:	Tina Post
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 21mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	272
ISBN-13:	978-1-4798-1121-2
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > General Books > Humanities > History > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Sculpture & other three-dimensional art forms > General Books > History > General Promotions
LSN:	1-4798-1121-1
Barcode:	9781479811212

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