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Featured Guest: With many awards such as the Sylvia Arden Boone Prize and degrees including an MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Arts from the University of Alaska as well as a Ph.D. in African-American & American Studies from Yale University, Tina Post is an Assistant Professor in the English department at the University of Chicago where she teaches such courses as Contemporary Black Drama and Performance and supervises Ph.D. students in the dissertation stage. We talked to her about her book Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (New York University Press, 2022).
Deadpan evolved from a creative nonfiction project I'd started after getting an MFA in creative writing. I had started writing a series of essays about racial embodiment, performance, and violence that centered on the lives of twentieth-century black heavyweight boxers, key figures in American popular culture. At a certain point, I was anxious about doing right by these historical figures – I'd never really taken a history class, being a creative writing, literature, and art history person – so applying to a Ph.D. program in African American studies was at first motivated by this creative work. During my coursework, a couple of things changed. First, I recognized that the figures I was most interested in thinking about were those boxers of really flattened affect such as Joe Louis, Sonny Liston, George Foreman, and others in the 1970s. I also realized that this deadpanned register ran throughout black cultural production. I'd first tuned into it through boxing, but I could see it everywhere. At that point, the scholarly project took on a life of its own.
Which brings us to the term "deadpan" – define deadpan as you use it in your book. Most of our readers are probably familiar with it, but provide some history and context for us here. "Deadpan" appears to be of vaudeville extraction. "Pan" was a slang term for face, so the term literally means "dead face." While often our first association with deadpan is as a form of comedy, etymologically it's a term of visuality, and this lineage was important to the project. Another thing to say here is that deadpan, as I come to use it in the book, is analogous to the ways inscrutability is discussed in Asian and Asian American studies. Inscrutability can be something that can be projected onto the Asian subject or something the Asian subject performs – aided, of course, by the expectation of their inscrutability. Similarly, deadpan might be something projected onto the inexpressive or insufficiently expressive black subject, or it might be something the black subject performs. In either case, a set of cultural expectations and preexisting narratives influence how others encounter and read that inexpression.
You wrote, "A reader may very reasonably wonder what is inherently black in the combination of visibility and withholding." Discuss this connection or lack thereof. To a certain extent, the answer to that question is "nothing." Black people aren't the only ones who consciously or unconsciously engage gestures of inexpression. The difference lies in the cultural apparati that surround racial identities. There are certain narratives that precede and, in some ways, preempt what inexpression means when coupled with blackness. In many ways, the book is an attempt to delineate some of these pre-existing expectations. And just because something is pre-determined doesn't mean it can't also be true. In fact, one of the expectations that surrounds the inexpressive black subject is that their expressionlessness is a defensive posture or resistance or a mark of their exhaustion or suffering. And sometimes it is. But I find myself a little bothered by the speed of this assumption, and the way it often forecloses any further questioning or aesthetic engagement. Sometimes, it's as though we take the observation of a sociological conclusion to be the end of the story and not the beginning of it.
Explain the concepts of specimen, specimenization, and respectability within the context of this monograph. The first chapter was my attempt to think through what seemed like a historical conundrum to me. Apocraphyally, Joe Louis was required by his managers to be deadpanned – this is particularly the term they use – in order to convey the impression of respectability. But – as we see with Sonny Liston not very many years later – there's nothing inherently respectable about an expressionless face. For Liston and others in the same occupation, expressionlessness was taken as a sign of menace. So why is there an association with respectability? To answer this question, I think about the genealogical links between a few types of images: early modern images of collected specimens (think Durer's beetle); racist, polygenesist images of enslaved people (the Agassiz daguerreotypes); and the images made or presented by racial progressives, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, to prove black work. The trick of it is that this last category has often engaged the terms of eugenicist image-making to counter eugenicist thinking. So, in Types of Georgia Negroes, Georgia, USA, presented by Du Bois in the Paris Exposition of 1900, frontal and profile images appeared side by side. Slightly later presentations of these images were cropped for focus on heads and shoulders and then coupled with moral and intellectual descriptions. What I noticed about the black middle-class attempt to convey respectability through image-making is the concession that blackness will always be subject to evidentiary looking, whether for racist or counter-racist aims. What the embrace of portrait photography adds, though, is the opportunity for black subjects to perform their modernity by acting as the scientific observer of their own specimenization. At the end of the day, what I find most important about respectability is not its attempted outcome, but its attempted process.
Speaking of images – Rashid Johnson figures prominently in your study. Rashid Johnson is a black contemporary artist. When I looked at some of his early photographs – in the book I discuss one called Jonathan with Hands – I saw an echo of the famous Richard Avedon image of William Casby, which is the photograph of a formerly enslaved man that famously appears in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. While Avedon's image of Casby is desperately close, Johnson's maintains a similar frame, but features Jonathan's hands obscuring his face. I'm interested in some of Johnson's early photographs because Jonathan with Hands provided me with an example of what it might look like to perform the kind of self-observation that modernity requires without acquiescing to its specimenization of the black body.
Words like "loom" and "looming" recur in this book. When I say threat, I don't mean that there's any actual danger there. Rather, threat names an affective atmosphere that can surround the inexpressive black subject. One descriptor that often helps name a sense of threat is "looming" – it's murky or inexact, but large and threatening and stubborn. This word choice became important to me because I noticed that in one of the seminal texts on minimalism – Michael Fried's Art and Objecthood – critiques of minimalist art bore a striking resemblance to the kinds of looming threats that attach to blackness. So I became interested in thinking through ways that some black artists use aspects of minimalist art to intervene in the aesthetics of looming.
Explain "The Opacity Gradient" to our readers. If fugitivity is not being seen, and opacity is being seen but thoroughly confounding that sight, we can think of several aesthetic strategies that allow for more or less scopic saturation. In the end, I discuss five points on a continuum: transparency, sheerness, obscurity, awayness, and opacousness.
I'm especially interested in work that seems so excessive that it empties itself out. My touchstone for this is black monochromes, and the ways they historically – from Allais to Malevich – related themselves to blackness. The joke, of course, is that with so much blackness, there's nothing to see. I compare this operation to plays – such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Neighbors – that use black stereotypes to such wild excess that they're affectively emptied out.
Explain to our readers how Buster Keaton and the British producer, director, and writer Steve McQueen are connected in your research. The final argument I make in the book is that we can think of Buster Keaton as having performed a mode of black deadpanning. There are both conceptual and historical reasons for this, ranging from, on the conceptual side, his pairing of insensibility with expressionlessness, or, on the historical side, his propensity to impersonate blackness outright when he was unable to perform his signature insentient indestructibility – qualities that were otherwise associated with blackness in dominant popular culture. Steve McQueen enters the frame because of his 1996 short film Deadpan, in which he re-enacts over and over the famous scene in which a house facade falls over Keaton, but he's in exactly the spot where the window frame is. I argue that McQueen isn't so much re-performing Keaton as he is taking back a performance mode that was already part of blackness.
In what way do you hope folks transform as a result of reading your book? I hope people come to think of inexpressive performances as complicated aesthetic assertions, whatever else might be true of the social conditions that surround them. I am not indifferent to social conditions, but I am very wary of an aesthetic interpretation that would frame all black expressivity in the happy, loud, colorful, boisterous, and so on. If black people are full, round cultural actors, then all kinds of aesthetic production have to be part of their aesthetic, expressive capacities – as opposed to more circumspect registers appearing as only an interruption of their naturally colorful expression.
Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Interviewer and Editor https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2024/post.htm
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