Apocalypsis : Letters, Diplomacies, and Becoming Malcolm X

• In Event: Epistolary Politics

Abstract

Beginning with Malcolm X’s letter-mediated conversion and his narration of how he learns how to read, this essay engages the black diplomacies and multiple worlds he composes as part of his revolutionary politics. More specifically, I explore the forms of address, amateur positions and dispositions, as well as the postal effect of the letters mentioned in his Autobiography and some of his correspondences during his travels abroad. Read together, these letters work to mediate Malcolm X’s own estrangement, document and mediate his encounter with worlds that had hitherto been unrecognizable to him, while contesting the some of the visions of the world and humanity arising from US racial politics , empire, and the narratives of the Nation of Islam.

Author

• Sam Opondo, Vassar College