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Through the other looking glass: kaleidoscope aesthetics and the optics of black leadership

This paper argues that James Baldwin's 1973 screenplay adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, One Day When I was Lost, mobilizes various visual technologies to produce a narrative that attempts to render Malcolm X out of traditional conversionist perspective, disrupting the reader's expectations for political leadership and cinematic closure. Reading the play through an analysis of Cedric Robinson's first monograph, The Terms of Order, I argue that Baldwin's vision of Malcolm mimics Baldwin's own tenuous relationship to religion and politics: instead of presenting a one-to-one mimetic portrait of Malcolm, Baldwin presents a kaleidoscopic visual form in which the politico-religious conversion experience is refracted through Baldwin's own evolving black nationalism and abstracted in the almost-visual medium of the screenplay.