Malcolm X: In Our Own Image

by Joe Wood (Editor), Patricia Williams (Contributor), Amiri Baraka (Contributor)

Assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X is still the most visible figure on the African American political landscape. His image is everywhere - on T-shirts, in music videos, on posters - and his name is invoked by a wide range of people claiming to carry on his legacy. But what exactly is Malcolm's legacy? And what exactly does Malcolm X mean to African America? In Malcolm X: In Our Own Image fifteen African American thinkers - including Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Arnold Rampersad, Cornel West, Patricia Williams, and John Edgar Wideman - answer these questions. Each essay critically examines a different aspect of Malcolm's life, and relates it to the present state of African America. As a whole, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image challenges and complements Malcolm X's own best-selling Autobiography. It will be of interest to anyone wanting to know and think more about Malcolm X and African America today.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was hard for me to read, though it was a good book. Opened my eyes to an entirely different world. Or, at least it seemed like it to this midwestern girl.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amiri Baraka's essay is the most lucid one here (besides RDG Kelley and Wideman's), and also serves as forewarning for the rest of the essays in this collection, which are either milquetoast meditations or outright hit-pieces from the likes of Cornel West and Adolph Reed Jr. Hilton Als's piece is probably one of the shittiest and most genuinely garbage texts I've ever read, in content and style—what a total hack. But yeah, Baraka really gets his finger on the pulse here: the class structure of a captive nation, transformed immeasurably by the distorted gains of the Civil Rights Movement to our conditions of domestic comprador-administered apartheid—this, reflected in the crucible of Malcolm as a living ideology held captive in freeze-frame.