In what follows, Mona Oraby, longtime editor of The Immanent Frame, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson, editor of Mapping Malcolm, discuss Malcolm X’s legacy, bridging academic scholarship and community-based intellectual work, editorial practice, and the need for critical, transdisciplinary research.
Mona Oraby: Your edited collection Mapping Malcolm is a beautiful assemblage of essays, conversations, and visual art exploring how Harlem shaped Malcolm X’s thinking and the many ways in which his legacy continues to shape New York City and the world beyond it. The contributors—artists, scholars, and organizers—think critically about the built environment.
For my first question, I have in mind someone who hasn’t gotten around to engaging with the book, listen to you talk about it, or is unfamiliar with what the project entails. How did you come into the idea that led to creating Mapping Malcolm?
Najha Zigbi-Johnson: It’s a joy to have this conversation and finally be here in this moment and reflect on this project almost a year since the book was published. The timing is actually perfect. Mapping Malcolm was born through a very real engagement with the legacy of Malcolm X that began after graduating from Harvard Divinity School. During my grad program, I realized that religious studies is not quite my main academic interest, but nonetheless work I’m committed to thinking through as it relates to social movement building and the production of Black thought, culture, and global identity.
I found myself in a very kismet or perhaps ancestral way working at the Shabazz Center as the director of institutional advancement in the thick of the pandemic. This was during the second wave, if you will, of global and national Black Lives Matter organizing in the wake of many vigilante and police perpetrated murders. The Shabazz Center is located in the Audubon Ballroom, which is a historic site in Washington Heights (in Upper Manhattan), and the site of Malcolm X’s later organizing work with the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). As you know, the ballroom is also where he was martyred in February of 1965 while giving a speech to the OAAU.
The space was reclaimed after a really long battle with Columbia University in the early 1990s while the institution was trying to expand its biotechnical campus in Washington Heights, which is a predominantly Latinx community made up of Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants. Ultimately, Dr. Betty Shabazz and comrades and community organizers and politicians like David Dinkins were able to preserve 44 percent of the Audubon Ballroom’s original structure as well as the facade of the building. The rest was leased out to Columbia University to use as proprietary space by the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
I think it’s important to start here because Columbia University is the largest land owner in New York City by the number of addresses it owns. The university owns much of Broadway and the surrounding blocks between West 110th Street and 168th Street—that’s three distinct neighborhoods. In this way, the university is reflective of its namesake, Christopher Columbus, who was one of the most rapacious imperialists in global history. As the most powerful real estate enterprise in the city, Columbia is following suit. And so, it makes sense that the university would try to tear down what has essentially become a pilgrimage site, and a historic site for remembering and honoring Malcolm X’s legacy. I was thinking about the relationship between this institution that has overdetermined the physical environment of Upper Manhattan, and particularly my community, Central and West Harlem, the neighborhood that I was raised in and currently reside in, and work in and have a stake in. I was also thinking about what Malcolm X, as a philosopher, would have to say about the relationship between institutions and people—between institutions and place—and how we might reorient the power that academic institutions wield over space, particularly Black space and economically depressed space.
While at the Shabazz Center, I worked to put forth a grant application with Columbia University for a project that would provide educational space for community members coming home from Rikers Island, as well as members of Columbia University who wanted to critically engage the legacy of Malcolm X and build alongside community members—following the model of freedom schools that emerged during the civil rights movement. I worked with a Columbia assembled cohort for two years to put together a seed funding grant to the university. After working for years alongside the university’s Department of Cultural Affairs and submitting a grant proposal at their request, Columbia essentially ghosted me after that project.This was the impetus for Mapping Malcolm. It was born through tension. It was born through a material and psycho-spiritual engagement attempting to steward his legacy alongside a whole cadre of folks, and really coming into contact with and coming up against the limitations of the university as a real estate enterprise first and an academic institution second.
Oraby: I’d like to think with you more about that tension, about how creative work is born from challenges routed through institutions. What came to mind as you were speaking is the form that Mapping Malcolm takes: a book published by Columbia Books on Architecture in the City, which is an imprint of Columbia University Press. There are two related questions here. At what point did you come to see a book as the form best suited to carrying or holding the vision for this project? And how did you decide to publish the book with an imprint underwritten by a university that has such a fraught relationship to Central and West Harlem, the neighborhoods you named?
Zigbi-Johnson: Thank you for those questions. It’s interesting. You know, nothing at an institutional level came to fruition in terms of the proposed collaboration between the Shabazz Center and Columbia University. What was offered at a very personal level was the opportunity to engage in an inaugural community fellowship at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). I was offered a fellowship to think through questions of preservation as the Shabazz Center’s director of institutional advancement, addressing the Audubon Ballroom as a historically designated site that has this incredibly tense relationship with Columbia University. And through that fellowship, I was invited to edit a journal or publication with Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, which in many ways is its own world within the institution. The work that they publish seeks to expand the formal disciplines of architecture, preservation, and planning, such that we engage in transdisciplinary thinking that allows us to explore how structural racism informs the built environment.
The fellowship itself was a mediocre offering and experience. It was not well thought out. It was really this reactionary offering to quell the anxiety and existential angst of liberal white faculty in an institution that continues to commit a type of ecocide and rapacious redevelopment and gentrification and displacement within Harlem and Upper Manhattan, broadly speaking. There’s something nebulous about the term “community fellow.” I think about the legacy of Black planners, architects, and thinkers who shaped the built environment—such as J. Max Bond, Jr., who was the dean of GSAPP, and built historic spaces like the reconstruction of the Shabazz Center in the early aughts, the Schomburg Center, and the old Studio Museum. There was a lack of intention and awareness in not naming this fellowship or rooting it in a particular lineage, place, or person. What that suggests about the recipients of this now defunct fellowship is that only we, the fellows, had something to benefit from our proximity to the institution in this one-way relationship. And it also suggests, perhaps, that we the fellows didn’t actually have anything to give the institution in our intellectual and community-based scholarship and inquiry.
What we know, and what Mapping Malcolm, I think, makes clear, is that it takes the genius of community members, of organizers, of our ancestors, and of artists alongside scholars to push the institution forward so that it is relevant in today’s world—and that the institution can respond to the variety of structural issues that we’re up against. We’re in this moment where we’re not sure what our future looks like and if there will be a future for us humans. This fellowship in some sense fell short; but the beauty of it falling short as an unformed space was that I had the opportunity to create something on my own terms. Toward the end of my fellowship, I was approached by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City to turn a small lecture I had given into a publication of my choosing. And I said, “Well, if you are giving me the opportunity to create a book, and I don’t know if I’ll ever have that opportunity again, I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do it to the best of my ability.” And this is not something I should ever be doing alone. I’m a reflection of the people in my community. I’m a reflection of the folks that I’ve learned from and built alongside. So quite naturally, I felt the book would be a collective assemblage of sorts.
Oraby: I wrote down your description of the fellowship program as a “mediocre offering” when you were speaking. I understood you to be saying that its mediocrity is based in non-commitment to the long term, its shortsightedness. For me, this raises questions about what commitment looks like in the university. I am also thinking about what you created despite (or in relation to or because of) the mediocrity of the offering: a material object—something that can be gifted, held, perused, mailed. Not easily dismissed. Every book lives beyond the time, place, and circumstances of its creation but Mapping Malcolm is an unusual project, one that far exceeds the terms of the fellowship granted to you.
Zigbi-Johnson: I would love to respond to that. One of the things I thought a lot about while at the Shabazz Center, and that concerns me to this day, is the conditions of the Black Atlantic archive. Where is our archive? In whose hands does it sit? Do we have access to it and to what end? I quickly learned that there’s a lot of precarity around Malcolm X’s archive and even our collective societal understanding of Malcolm X as a religious leader, philosopher, as well as humanitarian and political organizer.
As much as we know Malcolm X as a household name, I don’t think there has been enough attention given to the particularities of his world vision or to an investment in his legacy. And when I say legacy, I also mean the physical spaces in which he existed, whether it be the Audubon Ballroom or his childhood home in Inkster, Michigan and in Roxbury, Boston. The lack of investment reflects this country’s flippant attitude about Black history, which affirms the unfortunate reality that if we don’t invest in physical space, then it’s not worth remembering. I really sat in the tension of Malcolm X as a name most everyone is somewhat familiar with in this country, while acutely aware of the lack of resources that are allocated for his archive and remembrance and critical engagement. I thought about the need to create something physical that could serve as sort of an expansion of his archive.
I think a lot about the work of Saidiya Hartman and how she thinks through what was lost during the transatlantic loss crossing. And I think about her musings on critical fabulation and how might we think through what could have been. I’m not trying to necessarily do that in this project, but I think that her placement within Columbia University, and the range of Black radical thinkers that have come through Columbia University, means that there are still people there tending to Malcolm X’s archive. I think about people like Mabel Wilson and Kellie Jones and I think about the legacy of Manning Marable… I think about Maytha Alhassen, Garett Felber, and Zaheeri Ali. I think about all the folks who sat with Malcolm X’s archive, sat with Harlem’s history while at Columbia, and how Mapping Malcolm might sit in that legacy—that intellectual, Black radical legacy.
There’s this tension of Columbia being one of the worst perpetrators of US imperialism while also producing some of the most incredible scholar-comrades of our time. I think it’s precisely because they sit in the tension—of being in that institution and understanding the legacy of that institution while simultaneously thinking through the material conditions of the surrounding community—that this type of scholarship is able to be produced. Mapping Malcolm exists within this intellectual lineage. I want to actively wrestle with it. And it’s okay that not everything is settled. It’s okay that not everything makes sense. It’s okay that there’s tension—that this book was produced by the institution. I think its publication also affirms that the academy is a critical place for radical world building.
Oraby: Your response brings to mind something we discussed in a conversation prior to this one: the relationship between community-based intellectual work and scholarship, which is anchored in academic institutions, typically colleges and universities. Some academic fields are better than others at addressing this breach, between the personal and the theoretical, or are starting to. Alternatively, we could say that the breach is a poor descriptor of some fields. I take Jennifer Nash in How We Write Now to be making that point. She begins by naming the anticipated loss of her mother’s ability to read the first sentence of the very book she is writing. For Nash, who is thinking in this project alongside Christina Sharpe, among other theorists, the question of whether to disclose her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and how to write about it are linked: “[M]y own intellectual interests…have always been shaped by the conditions of my ordinary life.” I see Mapping Malcolm intimating a similar orientation—demonstrating it, modeling it. Nearly every chapter of the volume is personal and theoretical. The contributor—whether an academic or a journalist or an artist—interweaves a collective ethos with their contribution to the project, not exactly in an autobiographical sense, but in the sense of being grounded in experience. Even the primary sources printed in the volume, like the full-color reproduction of Ossie Davis’s eulogy, open up for the reader different entry points for thinking about Malcolm X’s archive and legacy.
Zigbi-Johnson: I have so many thoughts in relation to what you said, and I really appreciate that point. Maybe to bring the conversation back to the field of religious studies, which is my academic home, I think a lot about how we know what we know and how we make sense of the world. At a very personal level, my own spiritual orientation toward the world is rooted in a West African ancestral cosmology. This way of being in the world means understanding that we are guided by our ori, our head, and our head is guided by the orishas and the ancestors. And so, when we live in accordance with our ori or divine will (if we can think about it that way), then we’re living in accordance with our ancestors and their will for us on this earth. For me, that’s the most important thing.
And so, when I think about the ways in which the academy and certain academic disciplines aren’t able to reconcile the personal with the intellectual, I think about the fact that this project, in some sense, was like an ancestral download: I’m a vessel for knowledge that sits beyond me. When I actively listen—to my community, my elders, my own gut intuition, my friends, my peers—then I become a vessel. I’m responding to the material conditions of my community but also the psycho-spiritual conditions of my community that are shaped by white supremacy. In that sense, the project is a prayer. It is religious. There’s something deeply spiritual about this work in that I have to sort of empty myself. And when I think of emptiness, I think of spiritual emptiness in the way that Dr. Cornel West talks about kenosis as a type of spiritual self-emptying that someone like Malcolm X exemplified in his life. It’s not to say that I have done that. I’m thinking about that and striving in my lifetime to work toward that type of humility. I hope and pray that people see me and everyone who contributed to Mapping Malcolm as vessels for stories that are personal but that also exist beyond us. Ultimately, that’s what I’m most interested in.
There’s a need for a real criticality around the importance of transdisciplinarity as a way to seriously think through the ways in which our lives are so deeply entangled and exist in multitudes—particularly in this moment. Mapping Malcolm, by virtue of its assembly and the way that we—me, the editorial team, the artists, the elders that I was listening to and asking advice from (like my family, who really helped me through this process)—were all conceiving of this work, and also that, ultimately, when we talk about Brother Malcolm, it is not simply him as a historic individual that lived and died, but that we are also mediating on his continual legacy and what it has to bear on the world… on humanity. And so, there’s a real sense of humility that many of us have when we think about and honor and talk about someone like Malcolm X.
Oraby: I’m struck by your thinking about epistemology in relation to this project—how much it differs from ways that academics are trained to advance arguments and imagine our contributions to scholarly debate and situate ourselves in relation to what we study. I’m holding that together with your articulation of Mapping Malcolm as an ancestral download. What you’re describing is an engagement with a lineage but not one based necessarily or exclusively in discipline-specific conversations. The cosmology that you’re envisaging exceeds those terms. The person who flips through the pages of Mapping Malcolm will encounter Malcolm X as a historical figure who lives, who is alive.
Zigbi-Johnson: Right. Thank you. This orientation toward history and world making requires an entirely new syntax and cosmological structure that guides our work. My life doesn’t exist in any sort of binary. In this sense, there’s nothing objective about what we’re doing, including your decision to make space to explore Mapping Malcolm on The Immanent Frame.
We’re living in a moment where institutions are not only being dismantled but, in many ways, reconstituted to uphold increasingly authoritarian and extractive logics. Your decision to develop this editorial project outside of more traditional academic platforms feels deeply intentional. How do you see this act, both as an editorial and infrastructural pivot, as part of a larger practice of autonomous institution building and intellectual world making? And what does it mean to create space and spaces for scholarship that resist cooptation and instead inform collective imagination and care?
Oraby: Thank you for those questions. Early in my formation as an academic, I was encouraged by advisors and mentors at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago to attend as many talks and events as possible—however far afield they seemed from my research at the time. This was very good advice. These scholars were the first to model for me a kind of thinking that was expansive. They were asking big questions and convening scholars of various backgrounds and from around the world to think with them about those questions.
So I was formed intellectually not just by what I was reading but also by symposiums, conferences, workshops, job talks, and rehearsals across the university. These were held in different spaces on campus: the museum, the center for historical study, the institute for global affairs, the theater, the law school, the library, the seminar room. I was privileged to have been invited to listen and to observe and to participate in all these spaces. To have had access to them. To have had the opportunity to do some curatorial work myself. I soon came to see the whole city—Chicago—as a place of learning, a place where cinematographers and scientists, poets and lawyers, novelists and academics, and musicians and journalists came together regularly to think in libraries and theaters and museums. From there, I developed a view of institutions as hosts for conversation and debate. I can say now that the real intellectual work is in defining a shared problem for thought and shepherding critical inquiry about that object in novel ways and committing to thinking with someone whose way of thinking differs from yours. Universities are a kind of institution that holds this work, can support it, but this work can happen through other mediums and in other spaces.
I have always been interested in how people who are differently situated formulate and answer questions. My editorial work reflects this interest. I imagine multiple seats around a table and a shared object at its center and I wonder: How might someone sitting across from me approach what is at the center of this table? More often as editor, I am not sitting at the table but opening up the room where the table is and inviting people to have a seat. The question becomes: What do you think of the object that together we are observing? Through repeated acts of curation, my hope is that objects of shared inquiry become differently understood—by everyone who is invited to express their views and by those who read about the convening. This is how I’ve experienced autonomy in intellectual world building. So long as we remain open to the challenge of participating in and being changed by the act of convening, how we think and the results of our thinking, if there are results to be shared, in forms material or public, will always exceed institutions.
Zigbi-Johnson: As someone who is not in the academy, it feels really exciting that you find resonance in this project, and that you see this project as worthy of discussion and further inquiry. It’s exciting to see the thought that will emerge from having religious studies scholars engage in a transdisciplinary text that maybe isn’t always academic and that has a lot of art and a lot of mistakes and is deeply personal.
As much as I struggle with the academy as an institutional and hegemonic project in this country in particular, it’s where I found myself. I love the classroom. I love to teach, I love to learn, I love to think. And in many ways, I see myself as sort of an organic intellectual: someone who is thinking, responding to, and living alongside the people in my community and the conditions that we have been forced to exist within, and as someone who has had proximity and access to academic institutions that afford us a lot and that are also deeply destructive. I sit in that tension and I wrestle with that tension. Mapping Malcolm is still a book for academics. It’s a pedagogical project that is supposed to push the discipline of preservation, planning and architecture forward in a way that situates Black liberation, particularly Black sovereignty, at the center of all of our work.
I think about the fact that netanyahu graduated from MIT with degrees in architecture and management, and so I think about the architecture of encampments—at academic institutions but also encampment and genocide and restriction in Gaza—and the ways in which preservation, planning, and architecture shape genocide. And on the other side of that coin, I think about a figure like Malcolm X, who was grappling with the built environment and was remapping not just Harlem but the world through a transnational and liberatory politic. There is something I’m trying to say as an academy-adjacent person: I want to posit Black radical thinkers and organizers like Malcolm as intellectuals who continue to reshape the disciplines we’re a part of.I think about a book like Mapping Malcolm—with burgundy words that move on the page in a particular way—as sort of disrupting the normative structure of academic texts. I also think about the imperative of freedom dreaming, in the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, and what is needed of us as people who exist in the academy, and beyond the academy, but particularly people situated within the academy in this moment—when our capacity to think freely and to engage and talk about history is being monitored in such a scary way. We have to do this work. The world we are striving to build and everyone whoever comes after us is dependent on it.