“Poetics of Negation”: Kenneth Naylor Professor of South Slavic Culture Symposium at The Ohio State University

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.” As the project explores, to think Roma people is to think an “Asian archipelago[o]” jaggedly scattered across the European continent which antagonizes the continental aspirations of the Mediterranean. Relatedly, Afro-Puerto Ricans, who inhabit “plantation America,” embody and perform a lived orientation toward a “poetics of diversity” which enables an unpredictable mix of cultural contact in a “state of turbulence of systems” and antagonizes the discourse of racial harmony propagated through métissage/mestizaje (racial crossbreeding). Thinking alongside Black radical theory and Critical Romani studies, Poetics of Negation ultimately pushes us beyond “root identity” and toward inhabiting what Glissant calls “a poetics of chaos” engendered by archipelagic thought.