Carefully situating NOI realities within the larger anti-black American culture, West’s Nation Women Negotiating Islam: Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century expands knowledge about NOI women’s diversity and self-perceptions, especially some women’s thought (‘freedom consciousness’) regarding the significance of their activist and conceptual contributions to shaping and sustaining the NOI as an enclave of Black love for the flourishing of Black women and Black people beyond the white gaze. This book is an important text that joins studies which challenge reigning presumptions of Black women NOI members as submissive, dependent, and unaware.
— Rosetta E. Ross, Spelman College
Nationalist ventures—to forge a people—can neither be pursued nor realized, certainly not sustained across successive generations, through the efforts of men alone. Characterizing such ventures as ‘patriarchal’ as though a sufficient account, is inadequate, for the contributions of women are essential. C. S’thembile West discloses how this was the case for generations of Black women who became sustaining members of various iterations of the Nation of Islam (NOI). Her book will enhance understandings of the NOI while setting a model for producing more respectful scholarship on the organizational engagements of women devoted to the rehabilitation of communities and the forging of a rehabilitated people.
— Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., Vanderbilt University
A descriptive historical analysis informed by almost 30 years of critical thinking and ethnographic research, this book is a significant contribution to religion, race, and gender studies. Centering Black women’s lived experiences, West’s interrogation of perceived submissive behavior highlights the complexity of human agency and strategies employed on behalf of self, family, and community.
— Angela D. Sims, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School; author of Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror