ABSTRACT
The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf dramatizes veiling as a practice that cultivates spiritual disposition and feminist agency. Mohja Kahf endeavors to make brown and black women the foundation of a “new Islam” in America. Yet the overweening opposition of black and white as binary racial identities dominates the visual field in the Midwest of the 1970s and 1980s. Selective veiling becomes the metaphor for spiritual reclamation. For black Muslim women, however, whether national or migrant, selective uncovering recalls the forcible disrobing and objectifying display of black women as property in the US.
