Deadpan

Winner of the 2023 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 per