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Loading... Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpressionby Tina Post
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Surprising! I find a lot of these sort of books to rehash a lot of arguments that are either just 100% Glissant or 100% Mbembe, but this was way more wide reaching and charming, not to mention not stuffed to the gills with academic jargon. I don't know why the author tried to get Adrien Piper's permission to include their artwork in this volume, I don't think any of Adrien's work will be reproduced while they are alive, and probably another twenty years after that. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Awards
Finalist for the 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 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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)810.9896073Literature English (North America) American literature History and criticism of American literature For and by racial, ethnic, national groups Other groups Africans People of African descent In North America African-AmericansLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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