ABSTRACT
Drew Ali’s argumentative practices are important to analyze in order to better understand the construction of Black public culture in the United States. Contemporary historian Michael Gomez (2005) explained, “By virtue of his disproportionate impact,” Ali should be understood as “a principal architect of early-twentieth-century black social thought and movement” (p. 214). In addition to laying the foundation for establishment of the Nation of Islam, Drew Ali constructed a vision of race, religion, and nationality that, to this day, can be seen in numerous religious orders as well as contemporary hip hop groups associated with the Five Percent Nation, including Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, and Public Enemy. To understand Ali’s persuasive, and pervasive, impact, this essay reads his argumentative tactics as a minor rhetoric of Black Nationalism. Following a brief introduction to minor rhetoric, I introduce the MSTA, followed by an analysis of the central argumentative tenets Ali appropriated and reconfi gured to fashion Moorish American identity. I demonstrate that the concept of minor rhetoric can be productively mobilized to investigate argumentative attempts to craft identity. In short, the MSTA’s arguments constructed an identity that traversed the dichotomous positions offered by integrationists and Black Nationalists. I conclude by asserting that the concept of minor rhetoric can
be profi tably extended to argumentative analysis to demonstrate the constitution of a Black identity simultaneously opposing hegemonic norms and prior responses to those norms.
