Prologue: Twilight of the Icons

Chapter 1 “Prologue: Twilight of the Icons” offers a brief prologue regarding Black iconoclasm as a conceptual iconoclasm aimed toward uprooting Western Man’s social codes of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Engaging the nexus point of the Black radical tradition and contemporary iconoclasm studies, I ask: How do we discern Black radical thought and activism from the co-options of Western Man? Are we doomed to repeat a cycle of destroying a few icons only to inevitably produce new ones? I suggest that Black iconoclasm points us toward cracks, fissures, and paradoxes within what we otherwise consider to be purely iconoclastic or iconographic. Rather than rendering yes/no judgments on cultural products or entire schools of thought, Black Iconoclasm zooms in on Black rhetorics, media, and popular culture to consider how they reflect both Black radical excess and iconographic residues. This critical orientation yields practices and theories which fracture narratives that reduce Black liberation to reproducible sequences. Thus, Black iconoclasm is a mode of conceptual abolition which unsettles the supposed dialectical cycle of icons and iconoclasm. Reframing iconoclasm in this way opens avenues for new approaches to the relationship between Black resistance and the co-option of that resistance.