My work is preoccupied with racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) the ways that black Americans perform racial identity. What modes of embodiment assert belonging or dis-belonging, and how? When do racialized subjects confirm and when do they subvert the expectations of their identitarian positions, and to what end? How do other factors of embodiment (gender, dis/ability, hybridity, and so forth) color these performances? I approach such questions primarily through the lenses of affect and performance studies, using literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement as examples and objects of study.

My first book, Deadpan, argues that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness. The book 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. I do so to draw critical attention to when, how, and under what conditions artists find inexpression to be a useful tactic or desirable aesthetic approach. Correcting the persistent cast of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive, I assert that the performance of purposeful withholding plays a critical role in the work of black culture makers. Deadpan, I find, is a malleable and capacious register—a surface quiet that marshals genre, material surroundings, and movement in order to affect its audience.

My creative writing preoccupations are similarly concerned with the effects of formal/performative decisions in communicating—or in failing to communicate—one’s position, identity, or view. I am particularly interested in nonfiction writers’ experimentation with nontraditional essay structure—that is, in the utilization of literary devices more commonly associated with poetic form.

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 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.