What I call Black Liberation Philology is a constructive philology, an apprehension of language and texts whose form does not proceed so much from disciplinary considerations as from the goal it has set itself: to participate in the liberation of oppressed populations. as well as the decolonization of spirits. In fact, it is an in-disciplined way to read, to think the texts, their uses and their relations to power. Text, here, is understood in the broadest sense, is not confined to the written word and comes alive in the dynamism of orality. If the text is a web of words and quotations from other texts as the theoreticians teach us, then the Black Liberation Philology is a playful way of foraging and rummaging through the texts, unraveling them until the relations of power that they support are defeated.

Although the roots of Black Liberation Philology are to be found in the Black Atlantic of the 19th century, his project only matures with the advent of Malcolm X. Work on Malcolm X abounds. Their writers have been particularly interested in his activism, his personal struggles, his triumphs, as well as his shortcomings and his impact on American public life. Rare, however, have been attempts to conceptualize coherence, and even fewer have been those of pursuing his intellectual project. My conception of Black Liberation Philology is as follows: it is an effort to conceptualize the relationship that Malcolm X has with the language and the text, as well as a proposal for this report to be a living legacy that needs to be continue and enrich. In this discussion, I question the racist a priori at the root of the hagiographic narrative that Malcom X only became authentically Muslim when he discovered the Arab Middle East. Going against this story, I pay particular attention to the importance of language and translation in Malcolm X's thought and work throughout his life.