The name of Malcolm X alone evokes a range of social images and connotations which anchor it in the public zeitgeist as a hyper-militant black man, caused by racism but motivated by self-determination. Unlike other managers and writers who are very loved by the modernist era such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin – whose work of life has undoubtedly been overdue – Malcolm X rarely has the same dimensionality. That is to say so far.
Very well titled Malcolm cartography (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City), a new test of Essays traces the topography of the life of the political leader and constantly evolving positions towards politics, religion and love. By exploring the ways in which Malcolm X was shaped by the context of his built environment, passing from geographic markers from Nebraska to Harlem in the years preceding his assassination in 1965, the editor Najha Zigbi -Johnson and a series of contributors – including writers, artists and activists – offer a BluePrint to our world.
From the golden character font to the brown cover, the design of the book by Albert Hicks IV and Marcus Washington Jr. Calm We immediately plant in emblems of Islamic faith that guide the reader to tender experience with their subject. Passionate conversations, speculative essays and works of art giving in to imitate the intimacy of reading the sacred scriptures.
But in this case, the reader's conversion is the point. The book oscillates between two transitional junctions of the political awakening of Malcolm X: how he found the nation of Islam to become a black nationalist, and how he left him for Sunni Islam and to become a defender of human rights, fighting against world imperialism. In his essay “Moving in Thought: Malcolm X and Black Space-Time”, Commissioner Ladi'Sasha Jones describes the transformative power of the multi-scalar humanitarianism of the Brandard, which led him to establish the organization of African-American unity in 1964.
Elsewhere in the book, a transcription of a conversation between the researchers Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim underlines the interracial solidarity between Malcolm X and the American-Japanese activist Yuri Kochiyama, whose granddaughter Akemi Kochiyama is another featured contributor. Kochiyama's archive images in his Manhattanville project apartment, decorated with protest ephemers and were a site of abolitionist meetings of which Malcolm X was part, were reshaped by Zakiyyah Haffejee and Adam Osman as a 3D diagram to emphasize how the space also worked as a library and community center. In the moments when we see his comrades shining, we remember that the sun does not get up and did not go to bed alone on Malcolm X.
The scholarship holder of urban studies, Darien Alexander Williams, takes a different approach, highlighting the impact of Malcolm X on revolutionary black music through the drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln, providing a reading list with which we can sit to embrace the liberation by sound. Such a critical cropping of the complex heritage of Malcolm X distorts a sense of the traditional place, reminding us of our ability to fully transform the physical structures that we live in by acts of daily challenge.
Malcolm cartography (2024), edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson, is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, and is available online and via independent booksellers.
