'How Malcolm X Read his Milton', a talk by Orlando Reade

'How Malcolm X Read his Milton', A talk by Orlando Reade 

Malcolm X read John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a young man incarcerated in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He had just converted to the Nation of Islam, exchanging his surname for an ‘X’, and he saw Milton’s epic poem as a critique of white supremacy. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of other radical readers of Milton - including Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and C.L.R. James - who recruited Paradise Lost for their own political causes. In this talk, Reade will explore what each of these thinkers saw in Milton’s epic, culminating in Malcolm X’s astonishing interpretation.

Orlando Reade is an Assistant Professor English at Northeastern University London.  He received his PhD in English Literature from Princeton University.

His research has been on Renaissance literature, focusing on the English Civil War period (1640-1660), and the relationship between poetry, identity, and political conflict. He has also studied  the 18th- and 19th-century movements to abolish slavery as well as the current movement to abolish prisons. He has taught in prisons in New Jersey for five years. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, LitHub, and The White Review, where he served as a contributing editor.

His first book, What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, is about the extraordinary influence of John Milton’s epic poem on the politics of the modern age. It looks at twelve readers - including Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm X. He has written an introduction for a new Vintage Classics edition of Paradise Lost, published to mark the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death.

Co-sponsored by the Amherst College English Department and the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.