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Deadpan : the aesthetics of Black inexpression / Tina Post.
Van Pelt Library BF592.F33 P67 2022
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Post, Tina, author.
- Series:
- Minoritarian aesthetics
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.
- American literature.
- African American arts.
- Facial expression in art.
- Facial expression in literature.
- African Americans in literature.
- African Americans in art.
- Face--Psychological aspects.
- Face.
- Facial expression--Psychological aspects.
- Facial expression.
- American literature--African American authors.
- Genre:
- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
- Physical Description:
- 269 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : New York University Press, [2022]
- Biography/History:
- Tina Post is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
- Summary:
- "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."--Page 4 of cover.
- Contents:
- Introduction : Some type of way
- Subjectivity and self-specimenization
- Minimalism and the aesthetics of Black threat
- The opacity gradient
- Excess and absence (or, the Negro believes____)
- Buster Keaton's black deadpan
- Coda : Steve McQueen takes it back.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-249) and index.
- Other Format:
- Print version: Post, Tina. Deadpan.
- ISBN:
- 9781479811212
- 1479811211
- 9781479811205
- 1479811203
- OCLC:
- 1310766704
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