MARKHA G. VALENTAThere as here, then as today, the veil marks the intersection of white and black, male and
female, public and private, the material and the ephemeral, the economic and the human,
the rational and the spiritual, dispassionate science and passionate moral commitment.
In this way, the veil becomes not only the trope for marking conflicted social divisions
but also the nature of our own work as scholars mediating between the academic and the
political. That is, the importance of Du Bois’s work lies in the conjunction between his
critique of the American racial regime, of American materialism,andof the fundamental
methods and assumptions of empiricist rationalism. Throughout, the question is that of
how to make visible the invisible, ‘‘how to make intelligible that which has been relegated
to the outside of normative cultural boundaries.’’^58 By taking this as his challenge, Du
Bois transforms the veil from an agent of black invisibility into an active site of renewal,
creation, and critique: the mark of silenced difference becomes the site of innovative,
visionary dissent.
Applied to the West’s dominant accounts of Islam’s alienness, these resistant config-
urations of the veil by critical minorities, particularly Du Bois, offer the possibility not
only of disrupting the currently hegemonic discourse but of interrupting and rewriting
‘‘Europe,’’ ‘‘modernity,’’ and History themselves (along with ‘‘America’’)—to the point
where they become not simply territories of homogeneous space and empty time to be
fought over under a political regime of conversion but sites of rigorous and visionary
tolerance. Lest I be assumed to naively idealize what today in the Netherlands is consid-
ered by too many to be an old-fashioned and discredited commitment to diversity, I want
to conclude with a sketch of a very real historical alternative offered by Australian aborigi-
nal territorial practices:
Unlike countries that mutually exclude one another, this aboriginal conception of
country allows one country to span the territory occupied by peoples who speak
mutually unintelligible languages or different dialects, and who have different social
structures and kinship systems. It also allows for countries, tracks, to cross one an-
other, to occupy the same objective space. Typically one country crosses another at a
specific location that is important to both. Each group’s story of their dreaming tells
of the encounter with the other group at the place of intersection. When a group
performs rites at a totem location shared by other groups, they all meet together,
share their knowledge through dance drama performances, and form relationships
based on the terms of these crossings.^59The point is not that we need to create this in the West. It is already here; just veiled. All
we need to do now is find the words, and through them the worlds to match them.
YaˆSATTaˆR!
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