Deadpan

Tina Post is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

"It is in Post's creative and heterogenous readings that the force of her argument best comes across... we might ask ourselves why it takes so little in this life not only to be compelled to express absence, but to want to disappear entirely." - Tiana Reid (Artforum) "The text pulses with creativity as Post locates deadpan in theater, visual and performance art, performances of the self, and more ... With the ambition of her project and immense catalog of works, Post generates momentum for further study of Black aesthetics, affect, and modes of reserve." (Black Perspectives) "Tina Post's Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression reconsiders the historical legacy of the concept outside of traditional accounts of comedy and humor studies by offering an impressive "investigation of the aesthetic affects at work at the intersection of blackness and embodied inexpressions"… the study provides an intelligent contribution to the strands of literature on black performance studies, humor studies, and visual studies at large." (Film Quarterly) "In this startlingly original, theoretically nuanced, wide-ranging exploration of inexpressiveness as an underexamined performance repertoire in Black arts and culture, Tina Post makes a landmark contribution to the field of race and aesthetics. Deadpan explores the fine structure of a rhetorically intricate aesthetic technique as malleable in its uses as affect itself, and it does so with remarkable wit and precision." (Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form) "A stellar study filled with dazzling prose, poignant persuasion, ethical intervention, and intellectual adventure. While dominant US culture regards blackness as hyper-expressive, melodramatic, and spectacular, Tina Post carefully directs our attention to the subtle and sometimes inscrutable art of black inexpression. Across a sweeping repertoire—from nineteenth- century daguerreotypes to twentieth-century avant-garde performance to twenty-first century memes and beyond—she affirms 'illegibility's efficacy for the black subject.' She knows and shows that expressionlessness has been vital to black aesthetics, resistance, refusal, self-defense, self-making, and world-making. As I read about deadpan, my own face was anything but: Post's arresting arguments and gorgeous sentences made my black visage light up with intrigue, wonder, and delight." (La Marr Jurelle Bruce, author of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity) "Some books achieve significance in the time they were written, some command attention after they were written, and some remain timeless... Tina Post's book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpressions, which arrives timeously in 2022 is indeed quintessential in temporality and in the significance of Black cultural studies." (Ethnic and Third World Literatures)