What follows is a collection of thoughts, ambitions, and aspirations coauthored both in-person and online, in response to the invitation to reflect on our shared editorial vision for Mapping Malcolm. Addressing how this book came to be as a collaboration with its editor Najha Zigbi-Johnson has also meant articulating and rearticulating our broader editorial project. The writing offered here is thus a record of our many months and years of working together. It’s writing that we’ve managed to do this winter, in between and outside production on other work—a reflection on past and future commitments. It is the result of many rewrites, of endless marginalia, rewording, and requests for elaboration and consolidation—of sustained attempts to speak on our collective project, to say things differently, with purpose, and toward just and meaningful ends. Emphasizing as much, we believe, marks a critical acknowledgment that no one writes alone—that we are always in conversation with the words and thinking of others. Writing together helps us model a spirited, ongoing mode of engaging, questioning, and refining these commitments to others and to our shared practice.
We are Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and Meriam Soltan: the three individuals, colleagues, editors, comrades, disillusioned architectural workers currently responsible for the collective publishing project that is Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC). Writing this conversation out, rather than speaking it aloud and transcribing it, models what we believe to be a method of endless and rigorous coauthorship, accountability, and generosity.
The questions posed to us here come from editor Mona Oraby. We couldn’t be more grateful to be pushed and prompted in these ways.
The about page of CBAC names the imprint’s commitment to advancing knowledge in the discipline of architecture and to interrogating how that knowledge gets made. In what ways does Mapping Malcolm, a project that includes artists and scholars who employ modalities of practice beyond those traditionally associated with architecture, speak to that dual commitment?
We’ve always believed that knowing, making, understanding architecture demands we look beyond our own field for insight and guidance. The built—and destroyed—environment is nothing if not for the people that make a home of it. And that means engaging folks working, creating, deliberating across an entire spectrum of professions and lived experiences. It means consistently rethinking questions of genre, form, language, and expertise—of audience and authorship.
Mapping Malcolm perhaps best embodies that conviction more than any other title published by CBAC in recent years—not just in terms of who this project engages but also how and why it’s been framed as such. As the title and the book’s cover suggest, rather than look at a particular site or spatial practice, the book centers a person—a larger than life one at that—to understand the state of our built environment and envision what it could yet be in the project of Black liberation. By insisting that we turn to Malcolm X, that we listen, hold, learn, care for his expansive and complex legacy and personhood, that we take him seriously as a guide, teacher, and world builder, means daring to inhabit a perspective and worldview that is unapologetically against the imperial world order, rejecting structures and institutions of racial violence, domination, fortressing, power, and separation.
In one of our earliest conversations with Najha (maybe even the first), we talked about the tendency in architecture to separate the architect from the person—especially a person with a set of political beliefs. We committed ourselves to working against this tendency, against this separation. We talked a lot about the book’s role in understanding Malcolm as a “whole human,” in communicating the fullness of his life and legacy. This was a political stance.
As we write this, we’re reminded of Mohammed el-Kurd’s words about how the dehumanization of Palestinians happens in “very sinister and implicit ways” and how grief and outrage and sympathy and attention is extended to only parts of a person. Of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian journalist martyred by Israeli occupation forces while covering a raid on Jenin, he writes: “Shireen Abu Akleh was a person because she was a person.” Full stop. Maybe it is a stretch to say but we think this book is doing the same thing: It is resisting the “hierarchy of lives” and the hierarchy of teachers, thinkers, experiences, identities, and forms of knowledge that deserve our attention or that we consider relevant to the discipline of architecture.
Consider the cover of Mapping Malcolm. The warm, open, smiling person on the cover of the book—created by our brilliant graphic designers Ayem as a way to point to other ways of seeing and knowing Malcolm beyond the serious, unsmiling, angry portrayal that the world has come to know from other book covers—is a way of building up the physical archive of Malcolm’s complex humanity. This cover opposes the flattening of all those beautiful, brave, insurgent, revolutionary people—dead and alive—that the world seeks to subject and subdue for the values, ideas, and dangers they pose to the status quo.
Mapping Malcolm is certainly a thoughtful, contemporary examination of the political, religious, social, and cultural legacy of Malcolm X, yes. But in many ways this book is really about Harlem. And Harlem, like other sites the book connects with, is itself figured as a kind of living agent through which the political, social, and cultural legacy of Malcolm and so many others is not only enacted but formed. As Najha describes in her introduction, “Malcolm has always been alive in Harlem; his presence, politics, and spirit continues to reshape the neighborhood through a new spatial framework.”
Through this framework, the book’s true work, it could be argued, is centering Malcolm and Malcolm’s Harlem to ultimately see him in relation to others—other people, other histories, other sites. This is how we begin to see the work of “mapping” in the book. Mapping, traditionally, is a contested practice, particularly in the discipline of architecture. As many have argued, mapping has often been wielded by dominant, Western, imperial regimes to organize spaces—and thus people as well as their economic, cultural, and social practices—through dispossession and exploitation.
Mapping Malcolm insists on mapping otherwise. In this book, mapping is a tool to stage a series of reorientations and confrontations. Through its various contributions, the book stages confrontations between Harlem and the expansionist project that is the Columbia University campus; between the struggle for Black freedom and the weaponization of white supremacy; and between policing and the reparatory potential of the archive. Yet while Najha and the other contributors insist on these antagonisms, they also insist that such friction be enacted in communion with practices of learning, designing, and community building—practices that, unlike the imperial map and the violences it continues to inscribe in our contemporary spaces, ultimately affirm life and work toward abundance in the built environment.
Such are our commitments to Malcolm, to the work, to each other. The conversations we stage with and through this book model what, to us, feels like an editorial practice that most closely mirrors and communicates our own political, social, interpersonal convictions. It makes for work that is aspirational from the outset and in solidarity with others. It is also work that coheres internally with what it sets out to communicate, honor, reframe—and that meets the moment and momentum of the present while offering a reprieve from the forces that shape it.
We should say here that Mapping Malcolm is a project that has encouraged us to interrogate the limits and possibilities of our field by centering, at Najha’s invitation, the imitable Malcolm X. It does so by taking as our focus his liberatory faith, politics, and global analysis of power. It’s through this book that we’ve managed to craft an imprint that works closely with authors to steward books from conception through to completion. Our involvement at every stage of the publication process reaffirms the possibility of editorial work that embraces the generosity and tenderness of its contributors and source material.
There is a profound respect for ancestral labor and lineage embodied by Mapping Malcolm under Najha’s care. Every aspect of this book—from the conversations and contributions it holds through to the materiality, aesthetics, and paper choice—reflects her careful stewardship. This project has demanded we rethink the ways we live and work as a political project. It has also prompted the interrogation of all aspects of our personhood—culturally, socially, religiously. And so, the editorial labor that has gone into realizing Mapping Malcolm is itself an application of the book’s many asks and provocations.
Malcolm’s moral clarity continues to be a lifeline in the face of our shared struggle against racism and colonial violence. Mapping Malcolm invites all those working across the built environment to join us in exercising solidarity. All of this to say, perhaps on the more meta level: We consider editorial practice to be a form of architectural practice. We see the imprint as a platform that models alternative ways of authoring/building/constructing together by making books that materialize ways of thinking beyond the political imagination of our current moment. This is something Najha has said over and over again throughout our collaboration.
Could you speak to how your collaboration with Najha Zigbi-Johnson came about? What has working with Najha opened up for your sense of the collaborative thinking needed to advance CBAC’s aims?
We first came to know Najha and her work in 2022 when she was a community fellow in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservations (GSAPP) at Columbia University. We attended a lecture she gave as a fellow on April 14, 2022. Najha directly addressed the ways Malcolm X’s work advancing anti-imperialism and Black power should not only be studied but practiced by architects and planners to enact social justice. This lecture was the seed of Mapping Malcolm; it prompted us to approach Najha about working on a book together. We were inspired by the way she addressed, no holds barred, the field of architecture and preservation and Columbia University from an “outside” perspective but one that was proximate spatially from a position of deep intimacy and belonging to Harlem—the place, the community—and to Malcolm X’s legacy, both through her being a native Harlemite and her work at the Shabazz Center.
It was through this tension of belonging and unbelonging that Najha located the particular relevance of Malcolm’s teaching and political power analysis for practitioners of the built environment. Columbia University, as both a research institution and the largest landowner in New York City, inherently structures inequality. It structures inequality spatially—in the partitioning and dispossession of Harlem and its local community and beyond; in diminishing access to knowledge and resources, which is evidenced by its lack of investment in places like the Shabazz Center that hold Malcolm’s legacy. It is seen in the way that members of the Harlem community and the Black Power movement—proponents of the Black radical tradition—are extracted from and yet not centered or supported.
Najha argued that to think through Malcolm’s community building, knowledge, and political organizing toward total equity in the world, we have to interrogate and intervene in the very position and place upon which we seek to do this work. As a press with a clear, anti-imperial, anti-racist agenda that thinks deeply about its physical situatedness in relation to Columbia University—and all the possibilities, contradictions, slipperiness attendant to that relationship—Najha’s provocation resonated profoundly.
In an early meeting with Najha about the possibilities of the book, she spoke of her time at GSAPP attending a historic preservation course on Harlem. She was alarmed to discover that questions of race and social justice were considered not central but ancillary to the preservation field. These observations echoed our own concerns and motivations as a press in this field. We often say that we work from a place of deep frustration given the field’s blind spots—its failure to recognize, teach, and challenge architecture’s historical and contemporary entanglement with the violences of white supremacy. This frustration is both energizing and generative of new possibilities for reflecting upon and intervening in our field. This is what motivates us to seek points of view and collaboration from outside the discipline, to find new and diverse positions from which to shake off what we take for granted from our positions within architecture.
This has everything to do with how we think of CBAC: a project that is as much about making books as it is about reading them. For us, this has meant reading and relying on books from fields and disciplines beyond our own. In fact, over the years, a common response from folks who we’ve invited to contribute has been, “But I don’t know anything about architecture!” We spend a lot of time convincing people that their work is architectural and that it totally and completely created and recreated the context for thinking about what architecture is and what it does.
Najha has and continues to be so generous for the ways she has offered conceptual kinship and space to us as editors and to the contributors to Mapping Malcolm. The book is truly a model of collective editorial, creative, intellectual world/community building. Najha is the book’s editor, but she invited us in with a great deal of trust and freedom as shared thinkers on this project from the very start. We met and spoke often, sharing ideas, materials, thinkers, methodologies in the building of this book. And that trust extended to the contributors as well as to the graphic designers, who, as we mentioned, were encouraged to offer their own archival interventions.
This cultivation of community extended beyond the development and production of the book, with Najha thoughtfully considering how Mapping Malcolm might meet the world productively, meet readers, and reflect the intellectual commitments and values of its contributors. The book was set to come out in May 2024, a politically intense and fraught moment—given the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the war in Sudan and the brutal repression of students demanding divestment from Israel on Columbia University’s campus. This crackdown, and lockdown, underlined the enduring importances of Malcolm’s teachings (We were breathlessly sharing with one another countless protest signs featuring quotes from Malcolm during this period); it also deeply underscored the uncomfortable contradictions of our and the book’s relationship to Columbia University.
Najha took time to communicate openly and honestly with each of the book’s contributors, to acknowledge the book’s politically fraught and compromised position, and to make space for everyone to think about and voice concerns and desires for how we might launch this book in a meaningful way. We wanted its publication to bring about, create, inspire a world oriented toward our shared humanity. This was yet another instance that Najha practiced a model of care—recognizing the full humanity of the book’s contributors and the ways that knowledge is materially connected to land-based sites of struggle. She helped us to navigate this struggle together in the face of these contradictions.
To the extent that you’re able and willing to write about this: How has CBAC thought about the proper stewardship of power in relation to Columbia University, given its longstanding impact on New York City’s built environment—through property ownership and development—and response to nonviolent student protesters more recently? Put differently, how does an imprint such as CBAC advance a vision for world building alongside institutions, practices, and commitments that are in radical tension with that vision?
We really appreciate this question. It points to a set of tensions, contradictions, and entanglements that we contend with every day in our editorial practice and publishing project at CBAC. We face these as editors of an imprint; as university administrators responsible for stewarding a uniquely discursive and intellectual platform; as people in the world with a set of social-political commitments that are (more often than not) in direct opposition to the investments and commitments that make our work here even possible.
Our imprint’s relationship to Columbia University, over the last couple of years and especially this last year, has become increasingly difficult and tenuous. In fact, as we’re writing this—a day after Barnard and Columbia once again sent the NYPD to arrest student protestors—there is a poster up on College Walk (along 116th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam), which remains closed to the surrounding community (e.g., to Harlem residents). This poster advertises some of Columbia University Press’s latest books; it centers Mapping Malcolm. The irony (and audacity!), right? That the campus can be completely closed and shut down to the public as it tries to claim and celebrate the legacy of Malcolm X. This street closure, the subject of a recent lawsuit against the university, is but one instance in a longer history of attempted blockades, incursions, borders, land grabs, and dispossessions in Harlem and across the city. All this resonates with an image in Najha’s introduction of a Columbia student protest in 1968. Someone is pictured there holding a sign that reads: “Columbia is the enemy of all black people.”
We’ve said this already but it’s worth repeating: This is the historical and ongoing context of our work. Our collaboration with Najha unfolded in and through this tension—in the context of the university’s historical and ongoing extraction, dispossession, and gentrification; the historical and ongoing militarization and criminalization of student movements and encampments; and the historical and ongoing appropriation of resistance movements and their attendant epistemologies. Mapping Malcolm was printed as the former president of Columbia University called cops on campus.
We’ve always said that we are a small press based in the graduate school of architecture at Columbia. We intentionally try to use the word in—rather than of—to describe our relationship to the school for the ways it signals our pursuit of an editorial project characterized by friction. We’re not interested in simply reflecting the institution’s ideas and its discourses but in creating a platform that challenges and puts pressure on it. We are experiencing, in real time, what is permissible and impermissible to do and say as an imprint publishing in this context. We are also gaining knowledge about who is and who is not allowed, expected, or afforded the protections associated with academic freedom. We refuse many of the red lines that have been drawn in the last year, especially related to Israel’s US-backed violent militarism against and genocidal campaigns in Palestine and Lebanon. We oppose the university’s hostility to liberation movements, intellectual traditions, students, ideas oriented against this violence…
While we were in the throes of making this book with Najha, there was a conversation on decolonization held at Columbia GSAPP featuring Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture Art Research together Denise Ferreira da Silva of GSAPP. Hilal said something so beautiful and so true that we talked a lot about with Najha and that ultimately made it into footnote seven in her introduction. Hilal acknowledged how teaching and advocating for decolonization seems only possible and acceptable when the frame is either to study decolonization in the past or imagine it in the future. Demands for decolonization in the present, on the other hand, are made impossible, deemed unacceptable, controversial, biased, harmful, so on. This dearth of imagination also forecloses how practitioners of the built environment can connect to the material and ongoing movements for the return of land. CBAC exists within a school of architecture that has a culture and curriculum that centers justice and questions of race, class, gender across the built environment; that aims to decolonize discourse; and that concerns itself with social, economic, environmental well-being. This curriculum is meaningful insofar as it teaches, emphasizes, and supports decolonial work in the present when the stakes are so high.
Since 2020, we have been guided by the motto “show don’t tell.” As cliché as this might sound, we are more interested in modeling the project of the imprint: in making books that exemplify our aspirations as an architecture press, what is at stake, what is urgent, and what needs to be unlearned, rethought, rewritten in architectural discourse, among which are things like the taboo against speaking of the climate crisis without confronting the US military industrial complex—the single largest polluter on Earth by far.
Within the relatively small world of architecture publishing, CBAC has increasingly become known as a place fueled by and fueling this productive antagonism. Our imprint is a platform actively challenging the architectural status quo that continues to value buildings, property, nations, states, profits over people. We are horrified by the cowardice coursing through institutions right now, frustrated by the way conversations are being foreclosed and concluded before they’ve been able to take root, and dismayed by compliance with the rules and regimes of white supremacy. This frustration and horror drive our editorial practice. It is productive. We refuse to be cowed into silence. Maybe it’s too simple but this steadfastness does really seem to be the vision and approach foregrounded in our work as editors-publishers. The integrity of our platform depends on this refusal and this persistence—even if it means our own positions are at stake.