Territoriality, social justice and gendered revolutions in the speeches of Malcolm X

Abstract

Geographers have, in recent years, attempted to develop an anti‐racist research and teaching agenda. Critical to this endeavour has been an engagement directly with the theories and philosophies of key activists and scholars, such as W. E. B. DuBois and Richard Wright. Contributing to this effort, I provide a study of Malcolm X. As an activist and outspoken member of the African American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X re‐articulated Black radical thought in significant ways. In particular, Malcolm X placed a territorial dimension at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and in so doing re‐conceptualized the theoretical and practical linkages between the African American movement and other ‘Third World’ movements. The immediate purpose of this paper therefore is to delineate the territorial dimensions of the revolutionary thought of Malcolm X. Heuristically, this paper is situated within four broad areas of inquiry: revolutions and social movements; the thinking of space; anti‐racist geographies; and the imbrication of gender and revolutionary thought. More broadly, however, this paper reiterates the call for a more sustained engagement by geographers on the theories and philosophies of Black radical intellectuals.

Spaces and Scales of African Student Activism: Senegalese and Zimbabwean University Students at the Intersection of Campus, Nation and Globe

“…These journeys to colleges in Africa, Europe and North America have been labelled “pilgrimages” (Foucher 2002a; Gellner 1983): like religious journeys, they were both physical—separation from community of origin—and spiritual—involving development and transformation. Physical displacement aided the development of political thought (Tyner 2004), in part through distancing students from the concerns of home 4…”

“…2 2 Geographers have also neglected African activism more widely, including pan‐Africanist and anti‐colonial movements (Tyner 2004). …”

Black Internationalism, Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, and the Spatial Politics of Antifascism

“…The first section argues that although literatures on black internationalism have important implications for debates on space, place, and politics, they have rarely made these geographies explicit or interrogated them in depth. I position such internationalist imaginaries and trajectories as a key means by which black political activists have "struggled, resisted, and significantly contributed to the production of space" (McKittrick and Woods 2007, 6; see also Tyner 2004). The second section considers the dynamic political trajectories fashioned through black internationalist resistance to fascism and interrogates how the global organizing in opposition to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia shaped the terms on which African American volunteers engaged with the Spanish Civil War.…”

Reexamining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

“…Although a fully formed sociospatial understanding of the Movement has yet to be written, happily for the discipline, geographers have been active in assessing the Movement's success and shortcomings-for example, in the context of Malcolm X's geopolitical vision (Tyner 2004;Tyner and Kruse 2004), Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, notion of the "beloved community" (Inwood 2009b), and the role of territoriality and scale in Black Panther Party politics (Tyner 2006a;Heynen 2009). Likewise, the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival has attracted growing attention from geographers, both in terms of how the Movement was conceived and executed, as well how it is being remembered and commemorated in the present (e.g., B.…”

“…Also absent from the geographic literature is pedagogically oriented writing about the historical geography of the Civil Rights era (but see Tyner 2003). The relative neglect of this topic is at odds with the well-established body of work addressing both the need and techniques for considering social justice and economic welfare in the geography curriculum (e.g., Dwyer 1999;Merrett 2000Merrett , 2004Russo 2004;Webster 2004).…”