from the University of Pittsburgh, and his research interests lie at the intersection of Black rhetorics, media, and culture. He has published numerous peer reviewed articles in venues such as Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and the Western Journal of Communication.
Athanasopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Charles Athanasopoulos's website.Following Sharpley-Whiting, tracking the slippages in Fanonian thought is fruitful for meditating on how we can use parts of Fanon’s theories against Fanon himself given the limitations presented by his own personal investment in Western icons of gender and sexuality […] Engaging Spillers’ addendum to Fanonian theory, Fanonian slips highlight how Western conceptions of family and gender are inextricable from the racialized construction of Western humanity.A reader who opened Black Iconoclasm on this page would be thrust into a complex conversation surrounding my concept of a “Fanonian slip” in relation to Fanon’s own commentary on gender and sexuality. Page 99 opens by finishing a paragraph which begins on page 98 and interrogates Fanon’s comments about cross-dressing and that “he know[s] nothing” about women of color in Black Skin, White Masks. It ends by beginning to read Fanonian thought through the addendums provided by Hortense J. Spillers in Black, White, and In Color. I imagine that the reader would likely have to pause and decide to gain a fuller context of the chapter to fully apprehend the unfolding argument on this page. However, I think this page demonstrates that this chapter wrestles with the limitations of Fanonian thought as it relates to gender and sexuality.
In this broader chapter (pp. 89-127), I unfurl the concept of “Fanonian slips” as moments of slippage which accidentally emerge in the attempt to smoothen racial tensions. For example, I interrogate former president Biden’s statement that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” as a Fanonian slip which accidentally announces his correlation of rich/white, poor/BIPOC. In this chapter, I unfurl three examples across the interpersonal, political, and internal to consider how racial icons – public symbols which reflect Western values of race, gender, class, and sexuality – operate on every level of Western subjectivity and communication. Engaging Fanon and psychoanalysis, I articulate the slippage between Black skin and white mask in, for example, the public address of rapper Killer Mike and former president Obama. Fanonian slips thus reflect how Black iconoclasm manifests as a critical practice to be taken up within the flow of lived experience. This fourth chapter of the book, works in tandem with chapters on activism (Ch. 2), Black radical theory (Ch. 3), popular post/Ferguson films (Ch. 5), and BLM street art (Ch. 6) to unfurl a broader orientation of Black iconoclasm across different cultural arenas. Each chapter discerns the ways Black radicalism exceeds Western Man while also remaining reflexive about how those theories or practices may still contain residues of the very iconography we are trying to unsettle. This ritual process of Black radical discernment thus performs a lived orientation toward Fanon’s call for a “program of complete disorder” which eschews both linear narratives of racial progress and teleological blueprints of Black liberation.
--Marshal Zeringue
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