"How Malcolm X Read His Milton: Paradise Lost and the Politics of Abolition"

Reade, Orlando (2024) "How Malcolm X Read His Milton: Paradise Lost and the Politics of Abolition". Milton Studies. ISSN 0076-8820 (Submitted)

Abstract

This article looks at the relationship between Paradise Lost and the long abolitionist struggle, from the seventeenth century to the present. It considers the presence of an abolitionist politics in Milton’s political prose and explores the use of the term 'abolition' in Paradise Lost. It then explores Milton's influence on slavery abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Against the assumption that the Satanist interpretation of Paradise Lost is the only (or most) radical one, it argues that a common abolitionist interpretation refused to identify with Satan. It then looks at the successors of the abolitionist movement in the twentieth century, Malcolm X and C. L. R. James, arguing that they repurposed Milton's epic in their attempts to imagine a world not dominated by white supremacy. Finally, it suggests some uses for Paradise Lost in the contemporary movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex.

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