February 21, 2011 marked the 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Despite an almost incomprehensible amount of cross-disciplinary scholarship designed to analyze the monumental impact of the slain leader, recent work by Dr. Manning Marable suggests that it is actually only now, in the twenty-first century, that we can begin to conduct an honest assessment. The cause: a combination of critical and discursive narrative interventions on behalf of stakeholders vying for control over Malcolm X's legacy. In this thesis, I theorize deeply entrenched narrative constructions of Malcolm X through Dr. Marable's Malcolm X Project (a digital archive housed at Columbia University). As I argue throughout, the rhetorical power of co-opting narrative accounts of the life and legacy of Malcolm X holds the power to directly impact the public's perception of American race relations. This thesis is a thought experiment geared toward two primary goals: 1) marking the multiple "Malcolms" in discursive practices manifested in material objects such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and 2) theorizing the relationships between them. What I want people to see in this exploration is what it was that changed me, and how interacting with multiple narrative constructions of Malcolm X produces radically different realities; multiplicitous stories of contemporary America that all seem to exist at the same time, antagonistically woven together. As such, this thesis is a collection of essays ruminating on the power of collective memory and its roles in making the present -- as well as the future.
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