Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles’s fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly.

Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm, such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles’s own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles’s creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work.

Charles Athanasopolous’s Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink)

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Burke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14.

Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.

Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press..

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)