Autobiography, page 217 : a feminist entanglement with Malcolm X in Beirut -

Abstract

On page 217 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, Malcolm X writes about his experiences in Beirut, his first port of call after his 1964 hajj to Mecca. He dedicates the majority of his page-long description of the city to a screed against the liberty and boldness of the Europeanized women he writes of seeing on the streets of Beirut, and immediately connects the public appearance of young women with the moral virtues, or lack thereof, of a nation. This passage taken at face value would be fascinating in and of itself. But the collaborative writing process between Malcolm X and Alex Haley, both major figures in 20th African-American literature and history with very different politics, was so complicated and contentious that the Autobiography cannot be read as a simple narrative of Malcolm’s life. Black feminist scholars in particular have grappled with the legacy left to them by Malcolm X and by those who represent him. Their efforts have sometimes attacked, venerated, critiqued and honored him – sometimes all at once. This project then is broadly concerned with two engagements between Malcolm X and feminism: firstly, how gender, women, and proto-feminism informed Malcolm’s life and politics, and secondly, how black feminist scholars after his death have reckoned with his legacy. A close examination of Malcolm’s multiple visits to Lebanon offers a crucial perspective into the development of Malcolm’s thinking about gender and feminism. Malcolm, encountering Lebanon as the liminal threshold of reentry from the transformative rituals of his hajj to Mecca, falls back on Orientalist tropes of Arab women to symbolically preserve his political and spiritual geography, constructed with Saudi Arabia representing the moral ideal and the United States as its nadir. Malcolm was preoccupied with both critiquing the evils of Western constructs of modernity – colonialism, racism, capitalism –and also with promoting the Arab world and Africa as models of suc