Mapping Malcolm, edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 304 pp., $28.
This spring, amid the tents of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Columbia students gathered to strategize, sleep, eat, and read. Speeches and performances of music and dance enlivened the neoclassical campus. Now, a few months later, the fenced-off lawn is profoundly empty. Its grass is no duller a green than that of Columbia’s other parched midsummer lawns, but absent the life of the encampment, the area is somehow more arid, more deeply hollow. Fifty blocks north, part of the university’s medical school occupies the same building as the former Audubon Ballroom, the central meeting space for Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and the site of his assassination on February 21, 1965. Originally slated for demolition, the former vaudeville palace came to share space with the university in 1990, after Black political organizations, the Harlem community, and Columbia students rallied to block its destruction, one small battle in the ongoing pushback against Columbia’s creeping uptown takeover (another being the 1968 occupation of the Morningside Heights campus). Today, a portion of the former ballroom is home to the Shabazz Center, a cultural and educational institution dedicated to the legacy of Malcolm X and founded by his late widow, the community leader and educator Betty Shabazz, who also went by Betty X.
Political struggle—be it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Malcolm X’s Harlem-based movement, or ongoing fights to preserve the neighborhood’s urban fabric—establishes new coordinates in the built environment, transforming our relationship to public and private space. Invisible inscriptions adorn façades: This is where we were powerful, and this is where things changed, even only for a moment. Such concerns and affective traces animate the essays, visual and textual meditations, and other materials gathered by Najha Zigbi-Johnson (the former director of institutional advancement at the Shabazz Center) in her edited volume Mapping Malcolm. At its center stands Malcolm X, whose passage through physical and conceptual space serves as a framework for analyzing and articulating the embodied dynamics of Black freedom.
As Zigbi-Johnson acknowledges in her introduction, the collection is, like the legacy of Malcolm X, entangled with Columbia University: It grew out of a lecture she gave at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and was eventually published under the Columbia Books on Architecture and the City imprint. Following Malcolm X’s political development and peregrinations, the contributing authors take readers out of Manhattan and beyond Harlem—or rather take Harlem as a starting place for a global project of Black liberation. “So we start in New York City first,” Malcolm X said at OAAU’s founding rally in the Audubon Ballroom. “We start in Harlem— and by Harlem we mean Bedford-Stuyvesant (any place in this area where you and I live, that’s Harlem)—with the intention of spreading throughout the state, and from the state throughout the country, and from the country throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
Mapping Malcolm’s main aim, Zigbi-Johnson clarifies, is to advance a “critical cartography,” a challenge to policies of placemaking that assign hegemonic meaning and normative function to urban space. In adopting this slant, she and her collaborators consciously draw on a lineage of alternative cartographic and geographic lenses; the maps and diagrams W. E. B. Du Bois presented at the Paris Exposition of 1900, which visualized the social and economic impact of slavery on Black Americans, represent an early contribution to this field. Through mapping, radical cartographers were able to render empirical what might otherwise be dismissed as anecdotal, delineating capital’s racist production and organization of space and revealing patterns of segregation, mob violence, redlining, and overpolicing. The Black Panthers, for example, deployed maps as visual and data-driven arguments for community control of policing. In other cases, an emphasis on real place and space has functioned to ensure that dreams of freedom remain tethered to material coordinates—“A geographical imperative,” writes abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice”—or to furnish tools for speculation. (To this effect, historian Stephanie Camp and architect and scholar Mabel O. Wilson have evoked “rival geographies” and “Black countercartographies” that speak to the ways that Black freedom practices inaugurate new relationships to the physical world.)
So what do Malcolm X’s life and politics look like viewed spatially? In arriving at an answer, Mapping Malcolm takes both a broad and a narrow approach: Its analysis encompasses whole swaths of the world and then homes in on a single apartment, even a single room. In Zigbi-Johnson’s conversation with Marc Lamont Hill, this collection’s second entry, we get a sense of the internationalism Malcolm X embraced late in life, as his thinking moved beyond Pan-Africanism toward a Third Worldism that would even take him to Gaza in 1964. Global solidarities are further conceptualized by contributor Maytha Alhassen through ummah, the Islamic idea for the community of believers. Alhassen theorizes this placeless place, experienced with grateful revelation by Malcolm X on his hajj, as an antiracist framework for building unity through difference. “I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together…” he wrote in a letter from Mecca. “Never have I been so highly honored. Never have I been made to feel more humble and unworthy.”
Radical cartographers render empirical what might otherwise be dismissed as anecdotal, delineating capital’s racist production and organization of space and revealing patterns of segregation, mob violence, redlining, and overpolicing.
Mapping Malcolm is also deeply rooted in the local, in the neighborhoods and communities of New York City. A thoughtful essay from Christopher Joshua Benton situates readers on the street corners where Nation of Islam (NOI) brothers hawked their famous bean pie, simultaneously a symbol of economic independence (proceeds from sales were returned to the NOI) and an admonition against unclean eating. Darien Alexander Williams’s standout contribution locates Malcolm X in spatial and aural topographies. Foraging through archival sources and even NYPD surveillance reels, Williams curates and contextualizes a playlist of music by the artists who performed at rallies, fairs, and bazaars hosted by the NOI, including Max Roach, Babatunde Olatunji and his Drums of Passion, and Oscar Brown Jr. Such sonic invocations of the African diaspora formed a key element of the Nation’s cultural politics despite leader Elijah Muhammad’s denunciation of secular music—a prohibition that was, as Williams demonstrates, often ignored. We are invited to join Malcolm X in smaller spaces still: for instance, the prison cell where he converted to Islam, a crucible Joshua Bennett muses on in a personal essay. And in the contribution of Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim we see, rendered as an experimental axonometric drawing, the Harlem apartment of Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist and Malcolm X’s close friend. There, Malcolm X and three hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb explosion, stage a dialogue on antiracist, anti-imperial struggle and solidarity.
Most literary studies of Malcolm X (beginning with his own Autobiography of 1965) take a biographical approach, pressing his life into familiar narrative grooves: his troubled young adulthood, his imprisonment and conversion, his passionate ministry for the Nation of Islam, his falling-out with the organization, his untimely death. Mapping Malcolm reorients us, granting access to this daunting historical figure not only through time but in space, not only during his lifespan but in the present. At its strongest, the volume prompts readers to see him as a thinker and leader whose political development occurred alongside a real engagement with the world, issuing an enjoinment to avoid flattening his message and elevating his person into a saint. Remembering Malcolm X as a man who walked about the city, slept in humble lodgings, ate in modest eating places, and experienced arrest and incarceration might serve to counteract these deifying impulses. (Or not. After all, Jesus did those things, too.)
Can separatism ever have any place in a spatial politics of Black liberation? If he had lived, would Malcolm X, after his break with the Nation of Islam and in his growing understanding of the vitality of transnational solidarity, have distanced himself from this particular commitment?
At times, however, Mapping Malcolm falls prey to what in 1977 organizer and writer James Boggs described with wariness as a “metaphysical” approach to the leader and his politics, a tendency to value what Malcolm X said simply because he was the one who said it. The eloquence, power, and presence of the man that Ossie Davis, in his eulogy (reproduced in Mapping Malcolm in its original handwritten form), described as “our own black shining prince” exerts an irresistible pull, something his tragic killing only intensified. I myself am no stranger to this attraction. For many of us, as Zigbi-Johnson suggests in her essay, Malcolm is a tradition or ethos in which one is raised; this is especially true in her native Harlem, dense with traces of his life and work. If I were to describe my earliest encounters with Malcolm in spatial terms, I would say he was in my mother’s house, present in photographic reproductions and posters in a space where “by any means necessary” was the first political slogan I became conscious of.
Still, as Boggs suggests, truly honoring Malcolm X’s legacy would mean testing his politics against our own, refusing to receive them “as the ‘Word’ which we must not question.” In this vein, Zigbi-Johnson’s anthology raises one particularly thorny question: how to negotiate Malcolm X’s vehement commitment to Black separatism. As James A. Tyner notes in his essay on the geographic contours of Malcolm X’s project, spatial separatism was critical to its conception of Black freedom, autonomy, and power. This inheritance from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam formed a practical creed and political current that ran directly counter to Dr. King’s integrationist dream. In the face of the depraved violence of legal and de facto segregation, Malcolm X called for independence, rejecting the idea that Black people could live and thrive in a racist American society. “You don’t integrate with a sinking ship,” he said. The ambitions of Malcolm X and the Nation, and their spatial implications, were extensive: Black schools in Black neighborhoods, Black shops and restaurants where Black consumers would wield their economic might, even a separate agricultural system. These prescriptions were seen as antidotes to programmatic disinvestment in Black well-being.
Can separatism ever have any place in a spatial politics of Black liberation? If he had lived, would Malcolm X, after his break with the Nation of Islam and in his growing understanding of the vitality of transnational solidarity, have distanced himself from this particular commitment? Those devoted to furthering the cause of liberation owe it to Malcolm X’s memory and to ourselves to rigorously probe his politics with all the tools and approaches available to us. Mapping Malcolm offers a few new ones.