Dissertation Defense: Charles Athanasopoulos

Rhetorics of Complete Disorder in Post-Ferguson America examines how Blackness is figured within, and simultaneously destabilizes, the adaptive racial iconography of Western Man (e.g., race, gender, class, sexuality). The dissertation deploys the terms “racial iconography” and “racial icons” as a vocabulary for describing public symbols that instruct subjects how to fit within the social codes of Western Man. This project develops an orientation to the anti-Black world called Black iconoclasm which identifies how racial icons constrict Black radical imagination into a limited box of options that are offered as the only and natural way of thinking. Rhetorics of Complete Disorder in Post-Ferguson America develops this orientation to the anti-Black world inter(con)textually across theory (chapter two), visual rhetoric (chapter three), film/popular culture (chapter four), and communicative situations (chapter five). Engaging Frantz Fanon’s theory that decolonization is a “program of complete disorder,” chapter two examines theories of Black radical disruption and Black liberation emerging within communication studies and the Black radical tradition. Chapter three navigates new pathways through Édouard Glissant’s theory of “poetics of relation” by using it to negotiate the rhetorical contours of a Black Lives Matter mural in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chapter four develops a tool of critique called iconoclastic readings which considers in detail the process of icon-making in Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) as a response to the inter(con)texts of Black Lives Matter. Chapter five combines an examination of Fanonian thought alongside communicative practices related to Black Lives Matter protests and attempts to smooth over racial tensions more broadly. This chapter theorizes the Fanonian slip, which broadly refers to rhetorical gestures that are formed in moments of racialized tension and accidentally reveal something larger about how people form anti-Black metonymic associations. The coda of the dissertation (chapter six) directly examines BLM’s relationship to Fanonian thought, how the movement developed into the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN), the controversies surrounding BLMGN, and grapples with how Black iconoclasm gestures at invention in its breaking apart of what ossifies as icon.