Review: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, by Tina Post

Abstract

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, by Tina Post Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, by Tina Post Lauren Treihaft Lauren Treihaft LAUREN TREIHAFT is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and adjunct instructor at both CUNY and NYU, where she teaches courses on subjects ranging from dark humor to postwar Italian cinema. The subject of her dissertation project is the resurgence of cinematic deadpan as an aesthetics of recession in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. Her writing has been featured in Film Quarterly and Social Text Journal. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. New York: NYU Press, 2023. $89.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. 272 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.103 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lauren Treihaft; Review: Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, by Tina Post. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.103 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. New York: NYU Press, 2023. $89.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. 272 pages. Though the expression or inexpression of deadpan is most commonly associated with silent-film star Buster Keaton (“the Great Stone Face”), the comic actor known for the impassiveness of his face and the imperviousness of his body, 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” (3). Most descriptions of deadpan invoke a certain concreteness or frankness as the de facto qualities of the gesture or comic mode. Post astutely recontextualizes the notion of deadpan through the lens of a black historical intervention that begins in the early nineteenth century with the science of specimenization... You do not currently have access to this content.