May 20, 2025: Malcolm X’s 100th: An Opera

[May 19^th marks the 100^th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]

On two distinct and equally important ways to contextualize the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986).

As an Appendix to his collection Silent Interviews (1994; the Appendix begins on page 298 of that PDF), the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany included an extended November 1986 conversation with the composer Anthony Davis on the occasion of his then-new opera X. It’s a really wonderful and illuminating interview, and so in lieu of a full first paragraph I’d ask you to check that out if you would, and then come on back for some further thoughts of mine.

Welcome back! The starting point for Delany’s interview with Davis is a mutual recognition that Black people have long been subjects of operas, both around the world and in the United States specifically, but very rarely have had the opportunity to compose such cultural works (at least not ones that have seen the light of day). Perhaps that genuinely groundbreaking nature of Davis’s opera (which was co-written with two family members, as the libretto is by his cousin Thulani Davis and the story by his brother Christopher Davis) helps explain why it seems to have frustratingly vanished in its own moment; certainly it helps explain why the opera has made a triumphant comeback in the 2020s, although I shudder to think about its fate in the Age of Trump. In any case, I have to believe that Malcolm would have loved that he was the subject of such a controversial and crucial cultural work, even if he might have sneered a bit at the upper middle class (if not upper class) pretensions of the genre overall (it seems that Malcolm sneered at his co-author Alex Haley’s own such upbringing, anyway).

At the same time, I think it’s vital that we not limit our lens on X to questions of race and representation—there’s a reason, after all, why a good deal of the conversation between Delany and Davis focuses instead on the genre and traditions of opera, and on related questions of music, performance, staging, and more. I’ll admit to knowing very little about the apparently two-century history of American operas; and I have only recently started to learn more about the pioneering African American composer William Grant Still, who, along with his fellow and somewhat better-remembered composer Scott Joplin, penned groundbreaking operas in the early 20^th century. (I would add another groundbreaking early 20^th century work, Zitkala-Ša’s Sun Dance Opera [1913], to that list as well.) All of which is to say, for those Americans—and I would count myself in this unfortunate category, at least until very recently—who see opera as an almost entirely foreign art form, there’s a long and fascinating legacy of American opera to be recovered and restaged, and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X deserves a prominent place in that pantheon.  

Next MalcolmStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?