Verso Five Book Plan: Malcolm X
Che Gossett is an independent scholar and researcher working on the legacy of Black queer and prison abolitionist politics of Palestinian solidarity and a scholar-in-residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. They proudly admit that they are afflicted with what Derrida called "archive fever" are currently completing a writing project that synthesizes the archival papers of Edward Said, James Baldwin, June Jordan, and George L. Jackson. Their work as been featured in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex and Queer Necropolitics. In this new Five Book Plan, they present their top 5 books on Malcolm X.
One of the inspirations for this booklist is a quote I came across recently in Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said, the collection of his 1993 Reith Lectures (Those of you with archive fever can actually view the original copy at Said's collection.) The fact that Edward Said wrote about Black solidarity with Palestinian struggle throughout his corpus of scholarship, including in the Reith lectures, is not widely referenced, much less researched. However, both Baldwin and Malcolm X were critical of Zionism and contextualized it within global settler colonial logics. In the Reith lectures, for instance, Said discusses how Malcolm X and James Baldwin were central to his conceptualization of what it meant to be a public intellectual and cut against the grain of the status quo:
"But there can be little doubt that figures like Baldwin and Malcolm X define the kind of work that has most influenced my own representations of the intellectual's consciousness. It is a spirit of opposition rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them."
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told To Alex Haley (Grove Press, 1965)
Malcolm X is one of the earliest books I remember reading as a youth. I found his speeches to be riveting in their humor and wit—we watched "Eyes on the Prize" as children and my mother recorded all the episodes, back in the VHS days. The book was recorded as a series of interviews and really shows Malcolm X's development as a public intellectual from his candid reflections on his life, facing white/police violence as a youth and adult, his conversion to the Nation of Islam while incarcerated and his eventual break with the doctrines of the organization and turn toward a pan African geopolitics of Black internationalism. It's an intimate portrayal of Malcolm X.
2. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking, 2011)
This remarkable book by the esteemed Manning Marable, author of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, is gripping and almost cinematographic in its portrayal of Malcolm X's life. Marable uncovers an archive for Malcolm X, as well as chapters that were unpublished in Alex Haley's text. The book presents aspects of Malcolm X's story that are still largely absent from the dominant narratives and popular iconography surrounding his life: Malcolm X emerges as a queer figure, as we learn about his time as a sex worker and his early queer relationships (also referenced in Bruce Perry's work). This revelatory analysis deepens and enhances our understanding of Malcolm's life in the face of the policing effect of racial respectability politics. Marable highlights Malcolm X's global/transnational black radical political analysis and his trenchant critiques of U.S. foreign policy and imperialism—what Malcolm X called "dollarism." He also illustrates how Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam were central to Malcolm's political formation, while being critical of the NOI's separatist reluctance to critique racial capitalism along with white supremacy.
3. One Day When I Was Lost by James Baldwin (1972)
James Baldwin greatly admired Malcolm, and called him "the gentlest man I'd ever met" in No Name in the Street, in which he recounts showing up in Geneva to work on the screenplay with barely anything but his copy of Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X. It was this autobiography that Baldwin used as a template to write about Malcolm X, although the screenplay was altered by Baldwin's own imaginary of Malcolm. Baldwin was, however, highly critical of the depoliticizing force of Hollywood as an industry and the ways in which its disciplinary power would irreparably reduce Malcolm X's complex identity into a one-dimensional representation that was marketable for mainstream audiences. Despite his reservations, Baldwin wrote the screenplay and published his early version of it as an imaginative account of Malcolm X's life, in defiance of Hollywood industry expectations. It would later become the basis for Spike Lee's iconic film.
4. Malcolm X at Oxford Union Racial Politics in a Global Era by Saladin Ambar (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Saladin Ambar's brilliant book provides a political biography of Malcolm X and a close reading of Malcolm's speech and rhetoric, plumbing the depth of his literary and oratorical power. We also learn why this particular talk at the Oxford Union is so significant in terms of the chronopolitics of Malcolm X's thought. As Ambar incisively points out, the speech "stands out for its striking illumination of something beyond black nationalism and yet was unequivocally apostracialist." By focusing on this specific speech at a pivotal time in Malcolm X's political thought trajectory, this text gives us new insight into Malcolm X's black radical thought and politics and enables us to see how Malcolm X theorized global solidarity and resistance, by linking the Black struggle in America (in of itself an immanent critique of settler colonialism) to anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere.
5. Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin Debate, November 1960
This illuminating debate brings out the tensions between then-separatist and Black nationalist Malcolm X's political ideology and Bayard Rustin's stance on nonviolent and "integrationist" approaches to challenging anti-black racism in the United States. The key tensions that emerge in the debate remain enormously relevant today, such as the relationship between blackness and citizenship. Can Blacks even be considered citizens, or is that a merely nominal designation, as Frederick Douglass described the ephemeral notion of "freedom" in the afterlife of slavery. In our current moment of Black Lives Matter and continued Black radical freedom struggle, this debate about strategy and tactics—more a dialectic than a binary—remains relevant and important.
You can follow Che on twitter @chegossett.