In and Out of This World

With <i>In and Out of This World</i> Stephen C. Finley examines the religious practices and discourses that have shaped the Nation of Islam (NOI) in America. Drawing on the speeches and writing of figures such as Elijah Muhammad Malcolm X Warith Deen Mohammad and Louis Farrakhan Finley shows that the NOI and its leaders used multiple religious symbols rituals and mythologies meant to recast the meaning of the cosmos and create new transcendent and immanent black bodies whose meaning cannot be reduced to products of racism. Whether examining how the myth of Yakub helped Elijah Muhammad explain the violence directed at black bodies how Malcolm X made black bodies in the NOI publicly visible or the ways Farrakhan's discourses on his experiences with the Mother Wheel UFO organize his interpretation of black bodies Finley demonstrates that the NOI intended to retrieve reclaim and reform black bodies in a context of antiblack violence.