Dr Arun Rasiah

Arun Rasiah is Associate Professor and Director of Liberal Studies at Holy Names University in Oakland, California. His doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the philosophy and organization of Islamic learning. He teaches courses in the history of ideas and helps to prepare future teachers.

“Readings of Emancipation: Malcolm X and ‘Global Black Thinking’” proposes that the life, thought, and legacy of Malcolm X belong to a trajectory of metropolitan Muslim life situated in the global history of decolonization. The thought of Malcolm X is anchored in the prison education he fashioned in mastering the word and self, while reading the world against the grain of multiple confinements. The project examines the ethical implications of this ‘literacy for self- determination’, a unified commitment to learning and self-discipline, initiated with the epistemological shift of intellectual awakening and Islamic conversion. Malcolm X embodies the struggle to learn in conjunction with the duty to teach emancipation, reconceiving normative concepts of political self-determination.