Prophecy and Performative

Masculinity
Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his
meaning to his people
- Ossie Davis
• According to Houston Baker essential governing traditional structures of American history
constitute:
"Religious man," "wilderness," "migratory errand," "increase in store, and "New
Jerusalem……………. It represents the transformation of the wilderness into a community of
believers who interpret an "increase in store" as secular evidence of an abiding spiritual
faithfulness (Baker 19).

• These serve to naturalize the trope of “American Subject”

• Malcolm X, borrows precisely from this naturalized trope of American subjectivity in his
construction of oppositional black subjectivity

• Malcolm X's deliberate appropriation and inversion of this "white man's story" unnerves the
members of the white community and thrill the members of the black community
• Autobiography begins with a scene of chaos and violence-his earliest memory-that serves as
the narrative birth of the revolutionary:
“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan
riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house,
brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out….. The Klansmen
shouted threats and warnings at her that we had better get out of town because "the good
Christian white people" were not going to stand for my father's "spreading trouble" among the
"good" Negroes of Omaha with the "back to Africa" preaching of Marcus Garvey” (1).

• In the discursive terms of Baker's religious man ,Malcolm X has been baptized by fire into the
savage landscape of white Christianity, and into his messianic destiny

• America as a doubly uncivilized space

• Malcolm X, as an exile sent to interpret the wilderness of America

• Compromised nature of the masculinity available to black men in white America as
reflected in Earl Little’s destiny

• "As young as I was then, from what I overheard that my father was saying something that
made him a 'tough' man" (6).

• Punished for appropriating the discursive terms of American consciousness: self-reliance,

industry, mobility

• “After the fire, I remember that my father was called in and questioned about a permit
for the pistol with which he had shot at the white men who set the fire. …..The pistol they
were looking for which they never found, and for which they wouldn't issue a permit” (4).

• Homi K. Bhabha suggests that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite“ ("Mimicry"
• Malcolm X lays claim to full masculinity:
"It has always been my belief that I, too will die by violence. I have done all that I can
to be prepared" (2).

• Redefining the patronymic relation

• Malcolm X, through his enunciatory act, fills the X, symbolizing the loss of a
patronymic history, with a patronymic history of resistance, justice, courage,
independence, characteristics generally reserved for the trope of (white) American
subjectivity
• Roberto Fernandez Retamar theorizes the two subject positions available to the others of
colonial discourse as "Ariel" or "Caliban”

• For Retamar, "Ariel" represents the inherently complicitous traditional intellectual trained-
often too well-in the colonizer/master's thought.

• "Caliban" represents alternately the inherently rebellious oppressed classes or races, and
the organic intellectual from these classes or races

• Malcolm X theorizes them for African Americans as "Mascot" and "Homeboy”

• The possibility for subversion, then, lies in the other's inhabiting of these categories, in the
other's performance

• The mascot believes in the pretense of colonial appropriation, that a "perfect imitation"
transforms the other, entitles the other to the terms of civility
• As guardians of the state, they narcissistically authorize Malcolm's Ariel consciousness as a
mimetic identity effect

• Malcolm Little as mascot, comes dangerously close to slipping from partial presence to full
presence of (white) humanity

• Mr. Ostrowski as regulatory authority must police Malcolm's mimicry and tell him "that's
no realistic goal for a nigger" (36). Ostrowski reinscribe’s Malcolm as one of "those niggers"

• Malcolm X represents this change of consciousness as a necessary, preordained, precursor

to revolutionary consciousness

• Even though this move led to degradation, Malcolm X says, "All praise is due to Allah that I
went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian"
(38).
• Robin D.G. Kelley suggests that “Malcolm X's homeboy period-his zootsuiting, his lindy-
hopping, and his hustling-as part of a cultural war being waged by black working-class youth
against urban black bourgeois integrationism as well as hegemonic American (white) identity
and the capitalist work ethic” (156).

• “the hustling society illuminated the power of the trickster figure of the signifying monkey,
whose success depended not only on cunning and wiles, but on knowing what and how the
powerful thought” (171).

• “... I never would forget that-that I couldn't have whipped that white man as badly with a club
as I had with my mind" (77).

• Malcolm X mobilized the threat of racial violence only to diffuse it through the verbal
humiliation of the white man and the establishment of racial pride for the black man
• "The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects
that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace"
("Mimicry" 127)

• civilizing discourse of the racist state encodes the "mascot" as the partial presence of (white)
humanity, then the "homeboy," with his music, his lindying, and his hustling, is encoded as
the excess of presence

• Malcolm X successfully moves from a subjectivity encoded as partial or excessive presence

to a subjectivity encoded as virtual presence of (white) humanity
• In Malcolm X's Autobiography, words or a certain mode of speech serve the tropic function
usually reserved for weapons:
“What fascinated me with him most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen
command total respect ... with his words” (153-54).

• "I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided I could do this by
putting my name down to debate" (184)

• Yacob's history of the human race provided the mythical framework for the reappropriation of
black humanity

• Minister Malcolm speaks with the authority of God and history, this time a Muslim God and a
knowledge of world history
• Conclusion

• Malcolm X attains the fantasy of coherence that Judith Butler suggests, is at the center
of all identity formation, that motivates Malcolm X in the quest for full subjectification:

According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation,

however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this
idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. …. Such acts, gestures, enactments,
generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they
otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through
corporeal signs and other discursive means. (Butler 136)
• Judith Butler suggests, "What constitutes through division the 'inner' and 'outer' worlds of the
subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation
and control” (133).

• As an inappropriate subject, he lays claim to the inner world of the (white) tropic American
subject, thereby erasing that tenuous border

• Malcolm X in his recuperation of full masculinity as tropic American subject reveals to white
men that they lack an original claim to this masculinity

• Malcolm X reveals that there is no (white) essence to this tropic American subjectivity, because
this subjectivity is a fabrication he can successfully represents.