Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University. His research interests lie at the nexus of Black rhetorics, media, and culture. 

His manuscript Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress and Post/Ferguson America (Palgrave, Fall 2024) dismantles the Eurocentric notion of iconoclasm as the physical destruction of icons and/or recovery of supposedly pure counter-ideologies. Instead, Black iconoclasm refers to a liminal orientation toward cracks and fissures in narratives of linear racial progress and teleological narratives of Black liberation. How do we discern Black radical thought and activism from the co-options of Western Man? Are we doomed to repeat a cycle of destroying a few icons only to inevitably produce new ones? Athanasopoulos examines conflicting messages surrounding Black liberation in post/Ferguson America across activism, Black radical theory, communicative situations, cinema, and street art. Across each arena of American culture, his orientation toward the liminal unsettles the supposed cyclical nature of icons/iconoclasm by demonstrating that theories and practices of Black radical disruption always reflect both Black radical excess and the iconographic residues of Western Man. Those residues do not preclude those theories/practices from teaching us important lessons, they are how those lessons are learned to evolve our theories and practices of Black radical disruption. Institutional capture is neither simply inevitable just as no movement, person, or idea will be totally immune to Western Man’s racial icons. Thus, Black iconoclasm eschews purity politics and the pursuit of epistemological closure in favor of a critical orientation toward ritual transgression and Black radical discernment. Reframing iconoclasm in this way, Athanasopoulos opens avenues for new approaches to the relationship between Black resistance and the co-option of that resistance.

You can also find his work published in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Western Journal of Communication, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, & The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication, the National Liberty Museum, and the Monument Lab Bulletin. Most notably, Athanasopoulos was the recipient of the 2023 Critical Cultural Studies Division Outstanding Essay Award (National Communication Association) for his essay titled “Fanonian Slips: The Rhetorical Field & Function of the White Mask.”