1965 and the Global Intellectual Afterlife of Malcolm X

Abstract

1965 and the Global Intellectual Afterlife of Malcolm X Zareena Grewal (bio) MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable. New York: Viking. 2011. BLACK STAR, CRESCENT MOON: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America. By Sohail Daulatzai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2012. THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X. By Graeme Abernethy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. REBEL MUSIC: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. By Hisham Aidi. New York: Vintage Books. 2014. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by five men linked to the Nation of Islam, [End Page 9] aided by the criminal negligence, if not the direct cooperation, of the FBI and the NYPD. One can only imagine what our world might have looked like today had his brilliant career not been cut short so brutally. By November of 1965, Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, becoming an instant bestseller and the enduring, dominant representation of Malcolm’s life and thought. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is a revisionist history that draws upon a rich archival record including unpublished chapters of Haley’s manuscript and early speeches from private archives. Marable successfully upends much of the conciliatory racial narrative that Haley’s Autobiography imposes on Malcolm X, in part by excavating Haley’s own intellectual genealogy as a liberal Republican and exposing his political investment in writing the book as a cautionary tale about racial segregation. (9) Marable challenges Haley’s framing of Malcolm X as an integrationist evolving “firmly within mainstream civil rights respectability at the end of his life” (10). In fact, Haley omits and glosses over key events and achievements in the last year of Malcolm X’s life such as his international travel after the hajj trip (as well as a 1959 trip to Saudi Arabia) and his primary organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, material that figures centrally in Marable’s Malcolm X.1 While Marable adheres to the conventions of the genre of biography, he writes Malcolm X’s life story as an intellectual history, paying special attention to the radical internationalist strain in Malcolm X’s thought that has too often been overlooked or diluted in scholarly and popular representations. In Marable’s account, Malcolm X’s internationalism is firmly grounded in his parents’ advocacy of Marcus Garvey’s gospel of racial uplift and self-mastery. Capitalist, separatist, and pan-African humanist, Garvey’s vision of a transnational politics of black liberation, Marable argues, drew on thinkers as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, and Benjamin Franklin (18). One of the great strengths of Marable’s work is his ability to account for the continuities, tensions, and contradictions in Malcolm X’s thought over time. Marable demonstrates how the religio-political influences of Garvey’s teachings shaped his views even as a young man in Harlem. While his views converged with many of the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the moral vision of the NOI resonated even more deeply for him and was ultimately more profoundly revolutionary because, Marable argues, it was more explicitly theological than Garvey’s vision (54, 89). Even once he became a Sunni Muslim, Malcolm X’s religio-political views were far more radical and revolutionary than the way they are often memorialized. For example, Marable documents how his travels abroad made Malcolm X much more critical of capitalism and its genetic relationship to racism and how he became much more intrigued by the appeal of socialism to the post-colonial third world. This is despite the fact that for years Malcolm X had espoused the virtues of entrepreneurial capitalism, echoing Elijah Muhammad and his Garveyite parents. Troubled by the consistent cooptation of “one of America’s sharpest and unrelenting critics” by the same government that systematically and illegally harassed and spied on him, Marable bemoans the 1999 issuance of [End Page 10] a hundred million US postal stamps of Malcolm X as the completion of a long process of erasure, de-politicization, domestication and “Americanization.”2 In its press statement, the US Postal Service characterized Malcolm X as an advocate of “a...