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

This article looks at the relationship between Paradise Lost and abolitionist politics from the seventeenth century to the present. First, it considers the concept of abolition in Milton’s political prose and its different uses in Paradise Lost. Then it explores Milton’s influence on slavery abolitionists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Against a common misconception that the Romantic poets’ Satanist interpretation of Paradise Lost is the only politically radical one, it shows that abolitionist readers often refused to identify with Satan. It then looks at the interpretation of Paradise Lost by Malcolm X, one of the poem’s most famous modern readers, who saw Milton’s epic as an argument against white supremacy. It argues that this often-misunderstood interpretation should be considered in the tradition established by slavery abolitionists, as well as a precursor to the practices of contemporary prison abolitionists, including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba.