Malcolm X is broadly remembered as an icon of the struggle for Black freedom. This was in
no small part due to his remarkable oratorical mastery. Within African-American lore, his
feats of speech were all the more impressive given the narrative of his “homemade
education” while imprisoned, an experience symbolized by the figure of the aardvark.
Starting with this peculiar image from his Autobiography, I demonstrate that Malcolm was
also a philological thinker who considered the love of study a valid pursuit in its own right.
Moreover, I show how Malcolm’s philology, one that viewed words as constitutive of the
world, and one that emerged from a popular style of reasoning, might be mobilized in the
study of the global African diaspora. In so doing, I also re-cast the history of philology that
otherwise privileges an origin story of European exceptionalism. To make this argument, I
rely on a close reading of the Autobiography co-written with Alex Haley as well as the
journals that he kept during his travels to Africa and the Middle East, informed by but not
constrained to the historical record. The result is an image of a Black philology in action.
