Najha Zigbi-Johnson will discuss her edited volume Mapping Malcolm (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2024) as part of the Library is Open series at GSAPP. Responses by CBAC Editors Joanna Joseph, Isabelle C Kirkham-Lewitt, and Meriam M. Soltan will follow the presentation.

About Mapping Malcolm:

“For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought—his home of homes, where his heart was, and where his people are.” Nearly sixty years since the martyrdom of Malcolm X, these words from Ossie Davis’s eulogy remind us that Malcolm’s political and religious beliefs and conceptions of culture have profoundly shaped and been shaped by Harlem. Mapping Malcolm continues the project of reinscribing Malcolm X’s memory and legacy in the present by exploring his commitment to community building and his articulation of a global power analysis as it continues to manifest across New York City today. Mapping Malcolm interrogates the limits and possibilities of the archive as a purveyor of community development, the Black diaspora, and the state through a lens of sovereignty and liberation rooted in the political, material, and philosophical legacy of the Black radical tradition. This book brings together artists, community organizers, and scholars who understand the politics of Black space making in Harlem through a range of historical, cultural, and anti-imperialist worldviews designed to offer new, reparatory pedagogical possibilities. Together, they reconfigure how we understand, employ, and carry forward Malcolm X’s sociopolitical, cross-cultural analyses of justice and power as everyday praxis in the built environment and beyond.

With contributions from Maytha Alhassen, Joshua Bennett, Christopher Benton, Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, Stephen Burks, Ibrahem Hasan, Marc Lamont Hill, Ladi’Sasha Jones, Jerrell Gibbs, Nsenga Knight, Akemi Kochiyama, Denise Lim, Jaimee Swift, James Tyner, and Darien Williams.

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is an independent writer, cultural curator, and strategist. She currently teaches Political Science at the Macaulay Honors College at the City College of New York. Najha was formerly the Director of Institutional Advancement at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. Najha holds a B.S. and M.T.S. in African and African American comparative religious histories, and was a 2021–2022 Community Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.