“This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods. Today’s conversation is with Charles Athanasopoulos, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly pieces on politics and Black cultural life, as well as the book Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post-Ferguson America. In this conversation, we discuss the role of rhetorical traditions in Black Studies, iconic figures and moments in Black history and culture, and the various expressions of blackness and Black life in the political work of liberation struggle.”

In this talk, Charles Athanasopoulos delivers preliminary remarks on his second book project, tentatively titled Poetics of Negation. Poetics of Negation explores the ways of thinking/being/resisting which emanate from the seemingly disparate Afro-Puerto Rican and Greek-Roma communities across Puerto Rico, Greece, and the United States. Engaging Martiniquais philosopher Édouard Glissant’s embrace of trace (anti-system) thought, archipelagic thinking, and creolization, the book traverses space/place (landscape), musical traditions, personal reflections, religious iconography, community festivals, and institutional archives. In doing so, Poetics of Negation navigates new pathways through Glissant’s impression that “the archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles.”

“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.”

ERIAC acts as an international creative hub to support the exchange of creative ideas across borders, cultural domains and Romani identities. ERIAC aims to be the promoter of Romani contributions to European culture and talent, success and achievement, as well as to document the historical experiences of Romani people in Europe. ERIAC exists to be a communicator and public educator, to disseminate a positive image and knowledge about Romani people for dialogue and building mutual respect and understanding.

Dr. Athanasopoulos Joins the Editorial Board of Quarterly Journal of Speech, the flagship journal of the National Communication Association

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) is a call back to the historical Black power era to re-tell the story of Fred Hampton. Against popular depictions of the Black Panther Party as a violent terroristic group, director Shaka King offers an alternative narrative in which Hampton is assassinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with the help of an information William “Bill” O’Neal. By King’s own admission, this film is an allegory for the present post/Ferguson era which is meant to drive its audiences toward a more nuanced political consciousness concerning the fight to make Black lives matter (Russell 2021). Rather than uncritically praise or malign Judas and the Black Messiah (JATBM), this review engages Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) notion of a “deciphering” practice which thinks through both the Black radical excess and residues of Western Man present in popular media/art. The point, then, is not to render a yes/no judgement on this film, but to instead think through the multiple and sometimes conflicting messages we receive about Black liberation in our current cultural moment.

This essay was recently published in AfroPiq (Black Power Media) featuring a short meditation on Dr. Athanasopoulos’ newly published monograph Black Iconoclasm.

This recent catalogue essay was recently released by the National Liberty Museum (Philadelphia, PA) in conjunction with Philadelphia Sculptor’s to accompany the exhibition “In Pursuit: Artists’ Perspectives on a Nation”.

Contributors Charles Athanasopoulos, Jeanne Dreskin, Paul Farber, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Naomieh Jovin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Shannon Mattern, Nicholas Mirzoeff, TK Smith, and Marisa Williamson consider the specters, haunting sensations, and eerie remnants of the past as they relate public art, space, and memory.

In partnership with the Unity Multicultural Education Center, the Zags for Reproductive Justice club is hosting "Appetite for Autonomy," a five-week lunchtime lecture series that started on March 20, with free food provided for students.

The lecture series is divided across Hispanic Heritage Month & Black History Month. The lecture series is co/sponsored by Gonzaga’s Unity Multicultural Education Center, The College of Arts & Sciences, The Department of Communication, & the Puerto Rican Independence Party - WA.

Dr. Athanasopoulos’ “Fanonian Slips: The Rhetorical Function & Field of the White Mask” featured in Western Journal of Communication, has been awarded the National Communication Association Critical and Cultural Studies Division Outstanding Article Award.

The Black and Indigenous Futures Convening brings together artists, scholars, educators, and practitioners to unearth history, examine fault lines, and imagine new and different futures.

Dr. A has been awarded a Global Engagement Fund grant by Gonzaga University’s International Education Council to travel to Puerto Rico. His research will focus on the legacy of slavery on the island. Using the method of auto/ethnography, Dr. Athanasopoulos will be researching his own family’s history as Afro-Puerto Rican sugar cane plantation laborers in late 19th/early 20th century Aguirre, Salinas, Puerto Rico. This personal research is placed alongside important Puerto Rican histories, monuments, and theories. In doing so, this research project meditates on the prominent cultural discourses of Blanqueamiento (racial whitening) and Mestizaje (racial hybridity) and on-going debates over the Black Lives Matter movement in Puerto Rico. Analyzing these various materials offers a way to examine and wrestle with the enduring legacy of slavery in Puerto Rico.

Roundtable on decolonization efforts by Puerto Rican independentistas.

Public letter, panel, & fundraising effort in the wake of the most recent Hurricane in Puerto Rico.

Read the interview via Black Agenda Report.