Manning Marable's Reinvention of Malcolm X: the Biography That Hype Couldn't Save (Critical Essay)

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. asserts that Manning Marable "has written the definitive biography of this outrageously misrepresented figure." Cornell West echoes Gates in calling Marable's biography magisterial and the "definitive treatment of the greatest black radical voice and figure of the mid-twentieth century." Michael Eric Dyson sees the book as "a work of extraordinary rigor ...with startling insights and fresh revelations." He, too, sees the work as "the definitive work on as enigmatic and electrifying leader as ever sprung from American soil. It is the work of a public intellectual who many would have wanted to see corner the market on "Malcolm X Studies" in a manner akin to Newsweek unjustifiably assigning Skip Gates the role of Mr. African American Studies) From Marable's introduction it appears that he has directed his energies to correct what he considers to be the simplistic hagiographic depictions that characterize the emergence of Malcolm X as an icon of popular culture. In particular he references the popularity of the Autobiography itself and its uncritical acceptance, as well as the impact of Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X on the popular imagination and the youth and hip-hop culture. Marable expressed the following reservations about the Autobiography which informed his own Reinvention. "A deeper reading of the text also reveals numerous inconsistencies in names, dates, and facts. As both a historian and an African American, I was fascinated. How much isn't true, and how much hasn't been told?" (2)