Charles Athanasopoulos, a Ph.D. Candidate and DSAS Fellow in the Department of Communication, has published his most recent article “”A Program of Complete Disorder: The Black Iconoclasm Within Fanonian Thought” in Lateral’s 10th issue (10.1) dedicated to celebrating a decade of open access scholarship in Cultural Studies. Lateral is the official journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
CA’s essay examines the scholarship of revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon and the debate surrounding his conception of decolonization and “new humanism.” Across a multitude of fields, Black and cultural studies among them, Fanon has been heralded as an iconic thinker who offers us a path toward an alternative humanity. Working against the grain of this popular form of Fanonism, CA suggests that there is a Black iconoclasm—a deep desire to unsettle the very rendering of a systematic path toward decolonization—that pervades Fanonian thought. Accordingly, the essay examines and unsettles various forms of Fanonism by suggesting that their teleological narratives of redemption ultimately end up serving anti-Fanonian pursuits. Through an extended meditation on Fanon’s claim that decolonization is “a program of complete disorder,” CA explores what it might mean to embrace a Black iconoclastic approach to Fanon and the pursuit of Black liberation.
You can read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.25158/L10.1.3
You can also find CA's most recent book review on Dr. Louis M. Maraj's Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics which was published September 28th in Quarterly Journal of Speech here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.1980944