Nation Women Negotiating Islam
Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Lexington Books
Published:15th May '23
Should be back in stock very soon
Nation Women Negotiating Islam: Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century highlights that Black women modeled diverse ways of agency and executing their roles in the nation-building project of the Nation of Islam. Informants candidly discussed their roles as women who were members of the Nation family between 1955 and 2000. In their personal and collective struggles to maintain a revolutionary consciousness in their homes and community, Nation women demonstrated that women need not be and were not totally submissive to Black men, as they assumed respectable status as wife or mother. C. S'thembile West highlights that activism need not exclude motherhood or marriage and that the home constituted a “house of resistance,” as described in Angela Davis' seminal article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” (1971).
In sum, the role of Black women as mothers, teachers, and custodians of freedom consciousness had and has a significant impact on individual households and communities. Nation Women Negotiating Islam seeks to illuminate the intricate threads that connect Nation women as a critical component of the continuum of Black women's activism, despite disparate strategies.
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. 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 UniversityCarefully situating NOI realities within the larger anti-black American culture, C. S’thembile West’s book expands knowledge about NOI women’s diversity and self-perceptions, especially some women’s thought (“freedom consciousness”) regarding 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 ColISBN: 9781793642370
Dimensions: 237mm x 161mm x 24mm
Weight: 526g
234 pages