Tiana Reid

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  books March 2023

  FIERCE DETACHMENTS

  Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, by Tina Post. New York, NYU Press, 2023. 280 pages.

  PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ME often tell me I look fairly blank. It comes out in a swarm of ways. “I can’t read you,” someone who wanted to fuck informed me. (We didn’t make it to bed.) “She’s so serious,” a retail worker said, addressing the white person next to me. (I didn’t buy anything.) “She’s so boring” is another one I’ve gotten, mostly behind my back. (I’m a professor who doesn’t drink or do drugs anymore, so I’ll ungrudgingly admit to that—maybe too quickly.) “Well, what do you think?” is a

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  slant December 02, 2021

  Light Years

  IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996), the longest-serving director of the New York museum, the now-retired Philippe de Montebello, notes the popularity of his subject. “Virtually everyone who visits the Museum’s American Wing finds there the opportunity to experience a sense of the way our forebears lived,” he writes. A period room is a museological device that combines architecture, furnishings, decorative art, and functional objects to represent an interior of a certain time, place, and style. A feature of many museums, the rooms purport to represent