Newswise — Since his death on February 21, 1965, the man who changed his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X and then finally to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz has stood at the symbolic center of global Africana debates about diasporic consciousness, political liberation, strategies for Black empowerment, and Black religious identity. His legacy is one that evokes fierce passion and fuels urgent rhetoric, as can be seen in the various reactions to Manning Marable’s biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention1. This special issue contributes to ongoing conversations about Malik Shabazz’s significance in multiple fields, including history, English, ethnomusicology, American studies, ethics, theology, and religious studies. One of the issue’s most noteworthy contributions is its original findings about the “international Malcolm X.” Contributors Maytha Alhassen, Saladin Ambar, Alex Lubin, and Emily O’Dell use original archival and oral historical evidence to analyze Shabazz’s travel, speeches, and interactions in Sudan, Lebanon, Egypt, France, and the United Kingdom. These essays shed new light on Malcolm X’s political and religious philosophies, practices, and alliances, revealing him as an activist and thinker who was participating in overlapping struggles for human rights, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, pan-Islamic unity, Afro-Asian solidarity, and the empowerment of women. Many readers who are familiar with the Malik Shabazz found in the Autobiography of Malcolm X will be surprised by what these new findings uncover.

Another major theme in this special edition is the rich interpretation and appropriation of Malcolm X within contemporary intellectual, cultural, and political projects. Juan Floyd-Thomas and Cedric Burrows argue that Shabazz’s religious identity as a Muslim is underplayed, misinterpreted, or ignored in African American Christian theology and a literary genre called “readers,” anthologies designed for use in the college-level English classroom. Hussein Rashid documents how Malcolm X, the “martyr of Harlem,” is utilized by contemporary British Muslim rappers of South Asian descent to create new identities in the United Kingdom. Eboni Marshall Turman asserts that contemporary revisionist accounts of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam too often whitewash the sexism that permeated both the Black Church and the Nation of Islam in the middle twentieth century, while Terrence Johnson claims, in contradistinction, that the influence of black feminists, among other factors, led Shabazz to develop a model of “abolition ethics” marked by “deliberate reflection and creative exchange.”

Like every issue of the journal, this special edition engages critically with its subject matter as part of a larger multidisciplinary dialogue about Africana religions. But the timing of this special issue is no accident. Appearing so close to February 21, 2015—the fiftieth anniversary of Shabazz’s assassination--this special issue is also a commemoration meant to stimulate constructive analysis of his ongoing relevance for contemporary scholarship. We remember a singularly important figure whose transnational and diasporic voice continues to reverberate among African-descended people and has helped to inspire and influence the collective vision for this journal. Half a century later, the intellectual and activist legacy of Malcolm X is more important than ever for understanding the religions and the cultures of Africana people in the modern world.

Note1. Controversies erupted in print, on television, and on the internet. See, for example, “A Fiery Debate on New Malcolm X Biography: Amiri Baraka v. Michael Eric Dyson,” Huffington Post, May 19, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/democracy-now/a-fiery-debate-on-new-mal_b_864351.html.

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CITATIONS

Journal of Africana Religions, Feb-2015