Rosetta R. Haynes's book is a sustained reading of five spiritual autobiographies written by nineteenth century African American itinerant women preachers: Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, Amanda Smith, and Rebecca Jackson. However, those rarely discussed texts are not interpreted solely as literary or theological statements. Instead, they are addressed through a theory of radical spiritual motherhood, a concept Haynes has coined to connect a network of philosophical, political, and ethical issues related to questions of class, race, and sex in the antebellum African American cultural and religious context. It is through this conceptual network—supported by a well researched archive—that Haynes manages to show how theologies articulated in the texts she examines generated a radical politics opposed to slavery and the patriarchal structures of the family and the church and helped to revise, in a proto-feminist way, the meaning of motherhood (thus, as Haynes argues, the female preachers she examines suggested that motherhood could be more about helping a personhood sustain itself then about biological birth). The conceptual framework of spiritual motherhood helps Haynes formulate a fruitful and exceptionally well layered theory of subjectivity. Drawing on discourses as diverse as those of nineteenth century Shakers and Jürgen Habermas, Haynes argues that the preachers she discusses contrived a complex subjectivity, which was embodied (rather than abstracted and universalized as imagined by European enlightenment philosophers), migratory and improvisational (as opposed to fixed), performed (as opposed to innate), and self-fashioned (as opposed to prescribed). Haynes's analysis of the complex subjectivity she reconstructs out of the African American spiritual archive not only offers interesting theological insights into personal identity, but also, perhaps more importantly, shows how improvisation and alterations of identity—even those that occur in response to cruelty and violence—can generate a progressive non-identitarian politics which both transforms and heals the community in which it is performed.