HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMsave his life and to ritually mark his transition to a new, domestic existence far from the
exotic world of vice and danger he has traversed?^55
Finally—leaving Europe but remaining in the West—there is the veil’s distinctive
symbolic life in America and the possibilities it provides for reading the European dis-
course against the grain, a reading replete with the potential for creating both a more
complex understanding of the veil’s life in the West and revealing potential resistances
hidden from the generally derisive Western view. We might begin with Hawthorne’s
‘‘veiled lady’’ inThe Blithedale Romance, situated amid the growing tension between the
commercialized public realm and the private domestic realm. And then there is Madame
Blavatsky’sIsis Unveiled, the founding work of theosophy, which not only sought to bring
together the living and the dead, but also—through the figure of Annie Besant—Western
and Eastern religiosity, in the process transforming both. Most powerful of all, however,
is the way in which the great radical African American activist, scholar, and writer W. E. B.
Du Bois deploys the trope of the veil in hisThe Souls of Black Folk(1903). While in the
first instance the veil marks the oppressive divide between white and black, it also becomes
the site of resistant difference—a difference at once racial, gendered, ontological, and
spiritual—which has as its object of critique not only reigning racist ideology but also the
rationalism of Western Enlightenment discourse.
As Cynthia Schrager has explained, Du Bois’s intention in representing the ‘‘spiritual
strivings’’ of African Americans is explicitly to counter Booker T. Washington’s fore-
grounding of the economic sphere as the primary site of integration—what the critical
editors of the March 1905 issue ofThe Voice of the Negrocalled Washington’s ‘‘soulless
materialism.’’^56 Crucially, this articulation of the divergences between Du Bois and Wash-
ington in terms of materialism versus spiritual(ism) both followed the structure of the
larger debates of the day between (empiricist) science and (mystical) religion and refer-
enced the popular practice of spiritualism, whose intention it was to materialize those
who had gone beyond the veil of death. In this way:
Du Bois’s use of the trope [of the veil] joins ‘‘race’’ to ‘‘spirit,’’ figuratively installing
blacks ‘‘on the other side’’ as a kind of spiritual counterculture to white materialism.... Du Bois’s utopian image recalls the heterosexual complementarity at the heart of
sentimental culture’s gendered division of the public and private realms. Occupying
a position analogous to that of the ‘‘feminine’’ in sentimental culture, ‘‘blackness’’
functions inSouls—to borrow Kenneth Warren’s apt formulation—as a ‘‘posture of
dissent’’ against the materialism of American culture. At times romanticized, even
essentialized,Soulsoffers a powerful and problematic critique of the nexus of the
terms determinism, materialism, realism, and positivism... Du Bois’s use of pre-
modern images and resources inSoulsrepresents an important location for his cri-
tique of the enlightenment rationalist project, a project that is problematically
complicitous with the institution of slavery.^57
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