The most famous photograph of activist Yuri Kochiyama was taken at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, moments after Malcolm X’s assassination. Kochiyama appears in the top-right corner of the frame cradling Malcolm’s head. She simultaneously directs her attention to Malcolm’s fatally wounded body, which is centered in the picture. That composition symbolizes how over the past sixty years, Kochiyama’s activist life has been examined almost exclusively in relation to Malcolm. Although she had a prolific, decades-long career of human and civil rights activism, when she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-three, the obituaries commemorating her life announced that she was a “Japanese American human rights activist and close Malcolm X ally,” that she was “at Malcolm’s side when he died,” and that she was the “activist who befriended Malcolm X.” Only by reading the obituaries in full does the reader get a basic sense of Kochiyama’s work and how her growing and intersectional view of human rights from World War II to the 1960s put her in the position to be the friend to comfort Malcolm as he took his final breath.
 
In a chapter of Mapping Malcolm entitled “Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration of Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz,” authors Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra and Denise Lim shift the longstanding historical trend of reading Kochiyama in relation to Malcolm. Indeed, their title, which names both figures, is misleading. Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim in fact construct a new archive of their reciprocal relationship using family photographs, memories, and axonometric architectural drawings to recreate the night of June 4, 1964. That night, Kochiyama brought together hibakusha, or survivors of the United States’ atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Harlem Civil Rights activists—like Malcolm—and journalists at a reception for the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study at her Harlem apartment. 
 
Using a multimedia archive, Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim make several critical interventions. First, they decenter Malcolm as the singular driver of Kochiyama’s activism and narrative by positioning him instead as one of many friends who greatly affected her life and politics. Second, by “architecting friendship,” the authors join many scholars, including myself, in exploring how intimate connections such as friendships shape how people understand and mold the world around them,choose allies and enemies, and think politically. Third, Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim give scholars of all disciplines a new way to flesh out the stories, interactions, and memories that are often excluded from traditional archives and government repositories. As scholars have noted with increasing frequency in the last decade, these omissions overwhelmingly concern women and minorities.
 
Since his death in 1965, interest in Malcolm has only grown among general readers and academics. While a few well-known books immediately come to mind, including Mark Whittaker’s The Afterlife of Malcolm X, Ibram X. Kendi’s children’s book Malcolm Lives!, Les Payne’s posthumous publication spearheaded by his daughter, Tamara, The Dead Are Arising, and Peniel Joseph’s dual biography of Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., The Sword and the Shield. But there are many others. To see exactly how much interest there has been about Malcolm over the course of the last decade, I conducted an experiment. Using the search terms “Malcolm X,” I searched my institutional library website. After filtering for books published or republished between 2015 and 2025, I found 277 hits. When I conducted the same experiment for journal articles, even after refining the search parameters to include only peer-reviewed publications, I was presented with a staggering 3,655 English-language results. This included 884 articles in the arts and humanities alone. Mapping Malcolm is an example of that growing interest.
 
Much of this renewed attention is positive: It has revised the insidious narrative that Malcolm was ideologically rigid, politically naïve before he left the Nation of Islam, and opposed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent message. Nevertheless, as I have previously argued, Malcolm’s untimely death has created an obsession with uncovering new perspectives on his life. Because his life was “snuffed out just as it began to shine the brightest,” we are compelled to write a series of “alternate endings.” Ultimately, this desire is about us. We struggle and yearn to see ourselves in his life and activism and in his words and writings. Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim mobilize this contemporary interest in new perspectives to illuminate the lives of the activists—many of them women—who have been obscured by the supernova of Malcolm’s celebrity. Malcolm’s wife Betty Shabazz is one of these. Kochiyama is another.
 
Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim explore how Yuri’s relationship with Malcolm undoubtedly influenced the development of her political consciousness, including the projects that she undertook after his death. What the authors find through their investigation complements Kochiyama’s own account, which notes the impact of Malcolm’s friendship on her life and politics. The power of this friendship is evident in that famous photograph from the Audubon Ballroom and in the way Kochiyama, as the authors note, “held space” for him in the final moments of his life. Powerful and intimate relationships like Malcolm and Yuri’s—those that involve family dinners, heated debates into the early morning, respectful bickering over political positionality, and unwavering support in critical moments of violence and trauma—indelibly shape a person’s worldview. Many historians have begun to note how these relationships can be so powerful as to influence diplomatic relations and to lead countries to war.
 
But memory is fallible, and this is even more true when it is crystallized in the crucible of trauma. As journalist Joe Sacco noted in his graphic narrative, Footnotes in Gaza, eyewitnesses to violence, atrocities, and the death of loved ones do not remember these events consistently. As time passes, subjects’ memories are riddled with even more inconsistencies. Over nearly forty years, historians have grappled with the limitations of subjective memories of violence through a new historiography of trauma. At the same time, historians of women and marginalized people have revealed the unparalleled benefits of oral testimony for recovering histories that institutional and government archives often fail to represent. How do we deal with the memories of survivors of horrific or protracted violence when those memories are very much the product of trauma themselves?
 
Thus, while memories can give needed texture to the two-dimensional subjects in photographs and archival documents, they also require interrogation. To this end, I want to offer what is perhaps a controversial take: We must consider the possibility that the trauma of witnessing Malcolm’s death altered Kochiyama’s account of the past, and that over time the effects of this distortion became even more powerful. In retrospect, perhaps Malcolm’s philosophies seem incredibly impactful on here life, while her impact on his political development seems minimal. A different reading of her biography and memoir cast doubt on this interpretation. By the time Kochiyama moved to Harlem’s Manhattanville Houses in 1960, she had been making connections between dispossession, American imperialism, and racial violence for nearly twenty years. Both her internment and her experiences among immigrants, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans in New York City enabled her to see the connections between ostensibly different types of oppressions across time and space. She only met Malcolm three years later in 1963, after getting arrested at a CORE protest.
 
I don’t mean to argue that Kochiyama’s memories were incorrect but rather that they were almost certainly more complicated than she herself was able, or willing, to acknowledge. A traumatic event like witnessing the death of a friend can overdetermine a person’s memory of the past. But in the two years that Kochiyama and Malcolm cultivated their friendship, it wasn’t only her views that changed; as Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim point out, Malcolm’s views changed as well. The authors note that when they first met, Kochiyama wrote a letter to Malcolm critiquing his black nationalist and separatist stance and expressing her hope that he could recognize the “togetherness of all peoples.” In 1964, he sent a postcard to Kochiyama (reprinted in the authors’ chapter) that he was traveling throughout the Middle East and trying to “broaden his scope.” In June of that year, at the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Study reception, Malcolm linked the suffering of the hibakusha with those facing racial oppression and dispossession in Harlem. It is difficult to imagine that his relationship with Kochiyama, taking interest—as friends do—in the things that interested and motivated her in her life, did not promote these connections. As the authors acknowledge, it is essential to acknowledge the power of his relationships, including his friendship with Kochiyama, as instrumental to his changing view on the world. Thus, we see the reciprocal effect of the countless hours of conversation and debate they must have shared.
 
Finally, the methodological intervention that Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim make is among the most important parts of their chapter, which is written as a conversation between them. I was struck by their use of axonometric drawings—notably commissioned by the authors from two non-white South African architects—alongside two-dimensional family photographs and ephemera. Axonometric drawing, the authors explain, is a “method of illustrating three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional space” in order to “reveal multiple sides, angles, and perspectives,” which become clear upon rotating the drawing on one or more axes. Whether we work formally in spatial sciences, architecture, or urban studies, what we do as academics is two-pronged: We make the three-dimensional two-dimensional by transposing the lives of complicated and multi-faceted people and events into a readable narrative; we also make the two-dimensional three-dimensional by taking archival documents, photographs, and memories that often represent a single perspective and situating them in broader social and political contexts. 
 
We move back and forth between the requirements of our disciplines—to interpret and extrapolate from “objective” data—and knowing that to respect the complexities and contradictions of human existence involves looking through the page or the photograph to imagine the possibilities, perspectives, and experiences that a two-dimensional object cannot immediately reveal. The significance of the drawings in the chapter by Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim is amplified by the identities of the architects who made them. South African architects Zakiyyah Haffeejee and Adam Osman are members of the Indian diaspora to South Africa. Their work engages themes of diaspora and colonial dispossession while exploring how multiple timelines and systems of oppression overlap for non-white colonized people. Beyler-Yvarra and Lim use these axonometric drawings, and the diasporic perspectives that undergird them, to recreate Kochiyama’s multi-layered views shaped as they were by her knowledge and experience of overlapping oppressions.
 
From methodology to content, Beyeler-Yvarra and Lim have transformed the way I think about activism, biography, and perspective. I look forward to teaching this chapter and to engaging its lessons in the future.