Malcolm X's Ideology: From the Puritan/Nation-of-Islam Doctrine to Independence Rhetoric

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-ouzou (Department of English), language: English, abstract: This article discusses the shift of ideology in Malcolm X's Autobiography (1965) from a hybrid Puritan/Islam doctrine to a postcolonial, independence rhetorics with reference to two distinctive periods in the author's career, the period before and after his conversion to Islam in the early 1950s, and the one after his disaffection with Elija Muhammed and his entry to a Fanonian postcolonial polics in the early 1960s. To this end, a historicist approach is employed to show the link between the general evolution of American history during the Cold War and the evolution of Malcolm X's ideology.