continent. in Back Alleys: , , and the Reterritorialization of Public Space

John A. Sweeney continent.1.4 (2011) 253-278

A Sense of French Politics

“Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as “common” and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.”1

On April 14, 2011, implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and , commonly referred to as the Islamic , in public places [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3u6pWjDHY]. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full , only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”2 While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government’s targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa, perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. [pic 1] Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”3 Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=briS1bI7yeY].”4 Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in , Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”5 points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRHfLayTOsw]. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”6 Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence

ISSN: 21599920 | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. John A. Sweeney (254)

[pic 1-2] John A. Sweeney (255)

of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus, and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state—consensus, Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things—dissensus. He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”7 this reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.8 Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself— what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”9 To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one’s position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”10 [pic 2] The French government’s attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women11, reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”12 At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion’s actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”13 While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history.

The Art of the Veil

At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab, which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains:

The choice of the name, hijab, now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.14

While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in ), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even John A. Sweeney (256)

as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab, including the full-faced burqa and niqab, are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”15 The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and epresentationalityr within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab, is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “‘Street art’ is a sub-genre of writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”16 Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one’s sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one’s experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It’s important to note street art’s break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”17 From stencils to prints and to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.18 Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”19 As such, one can sense that street art’s relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, observes, “With street art, there’s no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there’s no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”20 [pic 3] As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art’s message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist’s deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and , this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot John A. Sweeney (257)

be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art’s utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab, multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity.

The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

“The true problem is not the horror of the shameless exposure of what is beneath the veil, but, rather, the nature of the veil itself.”21

In support of her research for The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture, Shirazi investigated sentiments concerning the veil during her annual trip home to Iran in 1997. As she drove with her brother from the airport towards their parent’s home, Shirazi was struck at the frequency and tenor of the local graffiti. She intimates, “Slogans such as ‘the improperly veiled woman is a stain on the Islamic Republic of Iran who must be eliminated immediately’ and ‘death to the improperly veiled woman!’ jarred me from my solipsistic reverie.”22 Graffitists can quickly turn the side of a building into a site of political and social contestation, and Shirazi’s encounter with the extreme and graphic nature of Iranian graffiti merits a closer look at the writing on the wall, so to speak, concerning the Islamic veil in relation to the geopolitics of space in Iran. As a heuristic for situating her snapshots of Iranian graffiti onhijab , it is useful to employ the framework of Ghassan Hage, who elucidates the strategies and tactics of “masters of national space” in White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.23 For Hage, the distinction between those condemning and supporting multiculturalism in in the late 1990’s is one of degree and not of kind as both profess a “national reality delineated by a discourse of internal orientalism.”24 this normative discourse, which echoes the locutions of contemporary European leaders both in content and form, relies upon the objectification of othered populations by enlivening agents whose rhetoric aims to reterritorialize public space as national space. These agents, who clearly feel empowered to make such claims, signal the bio-political governmentality driving these practices of exclusion and suppression, since “as they embody an imagined special relation between a self and a territory, such practices are better conceived as nationalist practices than as racist practices.”25 Witnessing this dynamic play out first hand as a heated exchange on a wall near a university campus in Australia, Hage examines the political economy underlying claims to public space as “home,” which is seen as the legitimation of a fully presenced and present bio-political authority. He explains, “The discourse of home, because it conveys a relation to the nation rather than some kind of objectivist definition of it, clearly implies not only an image of a nation that is one’s own, but also of a self that occupies a privileged position vis-à-vis the nation, a privileged mode of inhabiting it.”26 This privileging is apparent within the semiotics of Sarkozy’s pronouncement concerning the veil not being “welcome on the territory of France” and girds the imag(in)ing of the veil within nationalist discourses on public space, and by extension the citizens inhabiting it, as a site of sensory management— patrolled, both literally and theoretically, by the police. [pic 4]

The ideological formation of “home” works to unify the apperceptive mode of being for citizens and other(ed) populations by appealing to a chimerical space, even if imagined, that is devoid of difference, and “this desired national space is formulated as a wish to return to a former state of affairs, a return to what the nation ‘used to be.’”27 Encountering this exacting blend of spatial and temporal orthodoxy on the streets of Iran, Shirazi interprets these acts of agency solely through the lens of sexuality within Islam, and she John A. Sweeney (258)

[pic 3-4] John A. Sweeney (259)

seems to overlook the interconnections between discourses on identity and the nation-state. Indeed, this inter-dimensionality is integral in understanding the symbolic and actual value of the veil from both insider and outsider perspectives, even if they differ markedly. Noting another prominent tag, Shirazi reflects, “The slogan ‘If unveiling is a sign of civilization, then animals must be the most civilized’ implies that the veil is a sine qua non of civilized society and that any society that does not veil its women belongs to the animal kingdom.”28 The invocation of animality clearly alludes to the often cited purpose of and for the veil— inhibiting rampant carnality—but there exists a deeper and more complex ideology at work in above tag— one that strikes at the heart of human nature and desire as conceived from extremist Islamic perspectives. Explicating the ontological misgivings underlying the veil, which some root in ultra-orthodox interpretations of Islamic theology, especially groups who require full-face veils to be worn, Žižek argues:

If, following Nietzsche’s equation of truth and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. Woman is a treat because she stands for the “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth - the horrible truth of lie and deception, of course. Therein resides the concealed scandal of Islam: only a woman, the very embodiment of the indiscernability of truth and lie, can guarantee Truth. For this reason, she has to remain veiled.29

In concert with Shirazi’s graffiti and following Žižek’s line of reasoning, it would appear that the veil is a way of establishing the providence of humanity, which in Islam—defined literally as submission—is meant to submit itself to the will of Allah and in various ultra-orthodox factions equals submission to the will of men. Thus, what is at stake in the veil from various insider perspectives, is nothing short of the sovereignty of God, and, perhaps most importantly, the necessity of adhering to the principles and laws given by God that are interpreted by men, which, as the writing on the wall explains, is all that separates human from animal. Might the Iranian graffiti then be read as some theo-nationalist claim to a divine home? The writing on the wall, both literally and theologically, suggests that this is the case, and this claim would seem to entrench further the two sides of the veil debate, since what is at stake is nothing short of one’s sense as to God’s divine will that space ought to be radically separated. Supporting the theological division embedded within various conceptualizations of hijab, Guindi notes:

Evidence from its usage in the Qur’an and from early Islamic feminist discourse, as well as anthropological analysis, supports the notion of hijab in Islam as referring to a sacred divide or separation between two worlds or two spaces: deity and mortals, good and evil, light and dark, believers and nonbelievers, or aristocracy and commoners. The phrase min wara’ al-hijab (from behind the hijab) emphasizes the element of separation/partition, not, as is commonly proposed and frequently assumed, women’s seclusion.30

A feeling of connectedness to home, spiritually speaking, would appear to make sense as a reason for wearing the veil and subsequently make it all the more dreadful to those seeking to police an othered citizenry. The veil constitutes a marker of divinely ordained and radically differentiated space, which is collapsed through the premise that one is always under God’s law from the ultra-orthodox Islamic perspective, but it is also the case that the veil actually can and might be liberating for those seeking spiritual solace in police states, both literally and figuratively. Coupled with the fact that the veil does not have to be worn inside the space of one’s home, it becomes evident that the symbolic value and meaning of the veil is an affirmation of the radical division of space equisiter to Allah’s law, which is itself an interpretation as the Koran offers little guidance as to how women are to dress in public space aside from the injunction in Sura 4 to cover their “ornaments” and to dress “modestly.” The varieties of hijab derive primarily from the Hadith, an extensive collection of secondary writings attributed primarly to the prophet Muhammed and his followers, which actually challenges the clear distinction between the sacred and the profane evident within fundamentalist Islamic theologies. In other words, the diagnosis for hijab is Koranic, but the prescription derives from other sources, which thwarts any attempt to locate various forms of hijab John A. Sweeney (260)

as divinely ordained or, at the very least, Koranically-based. However, the radical division between the sacred and the profane within Islamic theology, which is shared amongst the foundational narratives of all Abrahamic traditions, is precisely what the veil is meant to overcome from the insider’s perspective, even if the veil differs according to the spatiality of its cultural capital, which is only part of the issue at stake in the French veil ban. Summarizing the findings from a qualitative analysis of veil-wearers in contemporary France, Hussain notes, “[...] in most cases, the women interviewed said they adopted the full-face veil as part of a spiritual journey. Many desired to deepen their relationship with God and draw on the actions of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives for guidance. They recalled their feelings of extreme joy and well-being on the first day of wearing a niqab/seetar.”31 Building on this sentiment, Afshar’s work comments on the relational tensions brought about by the veil for women wearing it in non-Muslim countries and for converts. She observes:

For Muslim converts the decision to wear hijab in the West is a public political assertion of the right to belong to the community of Muslims, but, particularly for convert women, it is not a rejection of home and hearth and kinship relations with their non-Muslim families and parents. Within liberal democratic states and feminist contexts their decision to wear the hijab is a matter of faith and identity and a political act of solidarity, but not one that alienates them from their kin and communities.32

The multiple allegiances that Afshar maintains are critical for making sense of the veil-wearer’s sense of self are exactly what have drawn such sharp theological and political attacks from all sides, even if the purported intent of the veil-wearer is spiritual, and it is problematic to divorce the cultural capital invested within its varieties. On the other hand, critics remain skeptical of the collusion between politics and religion that are embedded within the veil and see such spiritual justifications as a sign of the institutional interpellation that is a necessary component of a totalizing Islamic identity, which is also seen as transforming public space into a theo-national space—one where women are inhrently second- class citizens. Arguing against the theological homogenization of identity, Berger contends that “the contemporary use of the hijab seems to ignore or negate sexual difference in the theological order by helping to define and assert a single, overarching Islamic identity, while at the same time firmly establishing women’s specific role in the process: it is as though the particular invisibility of the hijab wearers enabled Islam to stand: in their place.”33 Berger’s combative assault on the ideology underlying the veil alludes to Žižek’s take on the veil within ultra-orthodox Islamic theology while raising the fundamental question at the heart of the veil debate: have the particularities of female identity been thrown out with the veiled bathwater of having one’s identity always-already mediated within the (public) space of Islam? How might these contending perspectives be reconciled? While such polarizations are inevitable on such a contentious topic, a more fruitful exegesis might ameliorate the delicate and tangled interconnectivity between spiritual and material economies, particularly in relation to the contemporary intricacies of public space and (representations of) female Islamic identity as they relate to the flows of global capital across spaces of exchange. commenting on the plight on women in , Sadiqi and Ennaji assert, “For some women, wearing the veil allows greater movement through public space, as veiled women have access to public space while remaining symbolically in private space.”34 Correspondingly, van Santen maintains, “In northern , as everywhere else in the world, putting on the ‘veil’, or rejecting it, may seem to be the autonomous actions of individual girls, but behind them are also institutions, politics and discourses of what it means to be a good Muslim in a laic, modern society in which nowadays one needs a secular education, too.”35 Reading these contentions alongside one another, the intimate relationality between spiritual and material economies becomes apparent, and the discourses on the veil are subject to the flows of global capital as much as discourses on subjectivity—now to be read also as agency—are veiled by the flows of global capital. In its present form, hijab cannot be divorced from the machinations driving the transnational economy of Late Capitalism, which Jameson conceives of as “catastrophe and progress all together” for the ways in which it dialectically stratifies space and identity, even in the most unexpected spaces—e.g. Iran.36 Summarizing the findings from her interviews with Iranian women, Moruzzi reports, “For educated young urban Iranian women, self-representation through hijab is a conscious manifestation of different forms of social status more than naturalized indication of political or religious identification.”37 Reflecting John A. Sweeney (261)

on her subject’s responses a bit more sharply, Moruzzi continues, “Dress as a form of self-representation is an indication of public identity, but it is not a guarantee of behavior of belief. And it is not a guarantee of politics.”38 Hijab, then, remains mired in the requisite performativity one encounters across various economies. While Iran and Morocco are certainly not representative of the conditions for hijab-clad women in France, the political economy of public space for veil-wearers is amorphously complex regardless of locale, and this ambiguity, which may be both spiritual and material, has much to do with the representative nature of the veil as a marker, even if imagined, of female Islamic identity within the divinely ordained space of the theo-national home, which is precisely the rub for managers of national space or the police. While the veil holds deep spiritual meaning for many of its wearers, it is also a symbol of the radical division of space required by both ultra-orthodox theologies and Late Capitalism, with the latter contending that the former cannot adequately exchange capital in a productive manner. As a marker of identity, however, the veil in its various is a clear sign of one’s participation within both spiritual and material economies and, more to the point, the collusion between the two, which become, in Deleuzian terms, an apparatus of capture through an embodied home economics. Outlining this strategic formula, Sharma observes:

Identifications are always about positioning people within a grid of power in which ideas of belonging mark not where one is located geographically but where one is positioned within the global political economy of home. Differentiated identities are part of a kind of home economics whereby people are separated from one another not by space or place but by being ‘embraced’ by the nation and the state in highly differential ways.39

As a means to understand the veil’s diverse and complex representationality, Sharma’s concept of home economics offers a lens by which to examine the strategic importance of feeling embraced—both spiritually and materially—that grounds the veil and its surrounding discourses, particularly those related to the failures of multiculturalism, and using hijab and female Islamic identity as a site of contestation, street art manifests a creatively contentious “politics of aesthetics,” which “suspend[s] the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.”40 [pic 5]

Veils and Vandals

“A wall is a very big weapon. It’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.” 41

if one were to identify a face that embodies the explosion of street art, it might belong to Shepard Fairey or, perhaps more appropriately, his now infamous caricature of Andre the Giant. As the ubiquity of Fairey’s OBEY image spread beyond urban centers on the East coast of the United States, Fairey set his sights on distributing another portrait in an iconic way—the famous “HOPE” print of then Senator Barack Obama made for use during the 2008 Presidential campaign marked the unofficial arrival of street art, which mutated beyond tunnels and bridges, as an aesthetic movement of considerable public attention [http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqpn6bBJ9Aw&feature=relmfu]. While Fairey had been a well-regarded and prolific street artist before the release of this particular work, which has come to epitomize the movement through its rampant commercialization and subsequent licensing litigation, the reception of street art as the next big “thing” seemed tongue-in-cheek, if not peculiar. The absorption of street art’s critiques of social and political malaise into the mainstream, however, signals the operational veracity of the amorphous mechanisms endemic to Late Capitalism, which require the constant production of capital and the commodification of desire. Indeed, Fairey’s art and his discussions of his work are overtly disparaging of economic and political propaganda across various contexts, and politicized representations of hijab are scattered throughout his immense oeuvre. Fairey’s first image of hijab appeared in 2005 with a piece entitled: Muslim Woman Offset. [pic 7] in a 2009 interview, Fairey talked about the print’s intentionally complex representation of hijab and female Islamic identity. Commenting on the ambivalent nature of this piece, Fairey intimates, “There’s the image of the woman with the AK-47, but the AK-47 has a flower in it. One person might see that as John A. Sweeney (262)

[pic 5-7] John A. Sweeney (263)

a symbol that we want peace, not war. Another might say that’s a terrorist and you can’t camouflage a terrorist with a flower. There’s also the idea that people are in a situation that is so complicated that we can’t unravel it so easily.”42 As a tacit admission of the ways in which factions of Islam have militarized and how Islam as a whole has been equated with terrorism as part of nationalist ideologies, this piece encapsulates the controversy at the heart of the veil debate albeit through an ambiguous representation, which, for Fairey, offers a moment of critical reflection. He explains, “I choose to use Arab women as symbols of peace and humanity because people might be able to relate to (them) emotionally, and that might lead them to reconsidering their position intellectually.”43 This confession echoes the argument that Arab women are ripe for representation as they signify emotional complexity, if not duress, which, if one reads between the lines, clearly relates to internal debates concerning female identity within ultra-orthodox Islamic theology and, now, the plight of veil-wearers in France. Regardless of whom does the representing, however, Muslim women remain objects of and for political ideologies, and this lingering concern haunts street art’s representations of Muslim women, especially as most, if not all, of those doing the representing are not Muslim women, which raises some serious questions. Is the linkage of women as object in Fairey’s work problematic in its equation of Islam with the ethno-racial characterizations of peoples from the Middle East? Is Fairey’s overly imprecise representation of female Islamic identity complicit with larger discourses on the nature of Islam? for Fairey, who makes no mention as to what position it is that should in fact be reconsidered intellectually with the exception of “peace” on the bottom left-hand corner of the print, the strength of his work lies in its recalcitrant and implacable representationality, and the reterritorialization of sense within his art is similar to that found within the hijab as a marker of identity and as the site of French home economics. As a marker of identity and theology, even if imagined, Fairey’s deployment of hijab in this work alongside the ambivalent meaning of peace is itself a commentary on the igneous mode of sensation represented within the veil under the aegis of Late Capitalism, which requires a modicum of certainty concerning one’s identity so as to pinpoint one’s productive and consumptive agency, even if it appears to make no sense [pic 8]. Commenting on the reterritorialization of sense embodied within the hijab, Berger elucidates, “The hijab, then, is itself pictured as a prosthetic eye whose gaze cannot be escaped, while it sends back to women an image of their selves, which they strive to appropriate.”44 Again, it is the appropriation of identity that marks the veil as a symbol of the othered gaze that drives ultra-orthodox theological interpretations of Islam as well as nationalist policies of exclusion against the veil as an all-encompassing symbol of Islamic identity. What this interconnection brings to bear on hijab and its representationality within Fairey’s art is the way in which both are deployed as an affect of the presence/absence or visibility/invisibility of Allah’s decree to submit, which has much to do with the overcoming of desire, even if one desires that others must submit; in comparison, the difference as to how Late Capitalism necessitates submission is slight even though the results differ markedly—representational agency remains key. In contrast to Muslim Female Offset, Fairey’s Arab Women Gold, which was released in 2007, captures the appropriated desiring embedded within the hijab by reflecting the gaze of the spectator back upon itself through the (prosthetic) eyes of its subject/object whose penetrating stare contains as much contempt as allure, and while this sensory duality is intentional, it also displaces a clear reading of the work as an instrument of complicity with and/or contestation of the discourses driving policies, such as those in France, and broader debates on the place of hijab in public space. [pic 9] Taking a more visceral approach, Princess Hijab, a fitting moniker for the unknown individual behind the “hijabisation” movement, is a Paris-based street artist who rose to notoriety in 2006 for her “niqabisation” of advertisements along the walls of French metro stations.45 Striking at the heart of the production of desire incumbent to Late Capitalism, Princess Hijab’s defacement, or perhaps re-facement, of large-scale corporate billboards, especially those featuring scantily-clad models, utilizes the most basic of tools—a thick black marker—to reterritorialize the sensible of Late Capitalism. Additionally, her choice of site—the underground tunnels beneath the bustling metropolis—demonstrates her palpable agenda, which takes up the veil as a symbol of unmediated desiring. As revealed in a 2010 interview with Angelique Chrisafis from The Guardian, “Why does she do it? ‘I use veiled women as a challenge,’ she says, quick to add that she believes no one way of dressing is either good or bad. She’s not defending the rights of any group and no one needs her as a spokesperson.”46 Deployed as mere instrument, the veil for Princess Hijab is simply a means, perhaps to no particular end, even though her perspective on the veil reflects a John A. Sweeney (264)

[pic 8] John A. Sweeney (265)

[pic 9-10] John A. Sweeney (266)

critical ambiguity of the political economy driving the debate within her home nation. In a follow-up email to the interview included in the article, she notes, “‘The veil has many hidden meanings, it can be as profane as it is sacred, consumerist and sanctimonious. From Arabic Gothicism to the condition of man. The interpretations are numerous and of course it carries great symbolism on race, sexuality and real and imagined geography [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0GLv-HzJFc].’”47 Demonstrating an astute sensitivity to the myriad flows of meaning surrounding the veil, Princess Hijab unabashedly affirms her utilization of the veil as an attack on the “‘visual terrorism’ of advertising” apparent within modern consumerist culture, namely Paris—the fashion capitol/capital of the world.48 However, she is clear to point out that her first priority is deeply personal and that her plight as an artist/ agent is what drives her work—“I chose the veil because it does what art should do: It challenges, it frightens, and it re-imagines.”49 The political aestheticization of the veil apparent in Princess Hijab’s work collapses the distinctions between material and spiritual ecologies, which situates it perfectly as an affront to the police, literally and theoretically. Responding to more specific claims that her art mirrors the cover-up agenda of conservative religious organizations, Princess Hijab playfully retorts, “‘My work supports right- wing radicalism like Taxi Driver support cabbies. I’m using the hijab for myself.’”50 Locating her personage at the center of the veil debate, Princess Hijab re-centers the very question of female Islamic identity through an implicit comparison with mainstream, which is to say predominantly Euro-Americanized hetero- normative valorizations, of beauty as reflections of what Deleuze and Guattari call “desiring machines,” which “are the fundamental category of the economy of desire.”51 These assemblages have no substantial meaning on their own and work only to produce more desire, which is precisely what Princess Hijab sees as the defining socio-political matter of our historical moment and the driving force behind her “‘graffiti of minorities,’” which can and might be construed in a number of ways, especially as the identity of the artist remains anonymous even though “the one issue that really shakes her – and perhaps reveals a little of her true identity – is the place of minorities in France.”52 Her concern for minority populations in France, even if indirect in her work, signifies an implicit critique of French home economics, which are predicated upon the desirously stratifying economy of Late Capitalism. [pic 10] from this lofty theoretical and aesthetic perch, one might locate the veil itself as a sort of desiring machine in its production/consumption of affect within the theo-nationalized space of Islamic political theology. The veil remains as much a mode, or perhaps node, of sensation as it does a mode, or perhaps node, of submission, even if the line between the two blurs and the definition—both of the veil and submission—varies according to perspective. As Gökariksel and McLarney argue:

The continuing centrality of the veil epitomizes the simultaneous challenge to and reification of stereotypes, as it becomes a marker of agency, self-expression, and empowerment. At the same time, representations of self-determined, independent, and professional Muslim women conform to images of the ideal consumer. While the veiled images re-inscribe Islamic norms and identifications by emphasizing particular ways of being Muslim for women, they also transform the very content and contours of Islamic piety and femininity.53

The transformation of female Islamic identity, especially within non-Muslim majority social ecologies, into an object of consumerist contestation, as with the work of Princess Hijab, presents an antithetical and labyrinthine commentary on the religious content and form of Islam, even if unconsciously. As Chrisafis reports, “So these blacked-out niqabs seem to represent everything but religion. ‘Am I religious?’ [Princess Hijab] asks, hesitating. ‘The spiritual interests me, but that’s personal, I don’t think it bears on my work. Religion interests me, Muslims interest me and the impact they can have, artistically, aesthetically, in the codes that are all around us, particularly in fashion,’ she muses.”54 Whether or not this quip was delivered tongue-in-cheek or marker in hand, and it is hard to imagine that it was not, Princess Hijab makes it explicitly clear that her interests have less to do with Islam than they do with the coding of Muslim agency in consumerist societies—a concern which she shares with female veil-wearers seeking access to public space in various countries around the world, including France. Her art, however, demonstrates that the arguments separating hijab from the operations of the nation-state are, at best, subjective and trivial in relation to the political economy of representative identity within the milieu of Late Capitalism, whose expansive underground she haunts. [pic 11] John A. Sweeney (267)

[pic 11-12] John A. Sweeney (268)

Working along the back alleys of Italy, br1 produces bold aesthetic representations of female Muslim identity and hijab in comparison to his contemporaries. Even though Italy has a relatively small Muslim population in comparison to its European Union counterparts, recent unrest across the Middle East and North Africa portend a significant rise as refugees seek solace from ongoing bloodshed, and rising tensions between EU nations and minority Muslim populations emboldened br1 to spread his work across Europe. While issues surrounding Islamic identity will certainly shape the future of Italy, br1, much like his colleagues, did not initially express interest in the veil as anything more than a symbol of debate and contention. As part of an email correspondence for a 2009 interview, he reflects, “I am secularized and I have a big respect for other people in general. I think that today is a risk to introduce religious elements on my poster, because I don’t completely know Islam, I am not Islamic, and I am not interested in religious. This is the point: why a dress has so strong connotation of religion? This thing attracts me.”55 Mediating a counter-spectacle to the objectification of women within contemporary society and Muslim women in particular, br1 offers a unique commentary on the imag(in)istic representationality of hijab within public space, discourses on multiculturalism, and, even if unintentionally, other street art. Shying away from more complex and ambiguous images, his work, especially pieces depicting Muslim women with their families, challenges the ideological isolation that is imag(in)ed to be wrought upon the veil and its wearers, which is part and parcel of (post)multiculturalist—to be read again as nationalist—discourses. Condensing the ideological irony at the heart of the veil debate within non-Muslim majority contexts, Žižek elucidates, “Women are permitted to wear the veil if this is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands and family. However, the moment women wear a veil to exercise a free individual choice, say in order to realise their own spirituality, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely. It is no longer a sign of their belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality.”56 In cutting off the possibility of choice itself, however, the French ban has effectively eclipsed the illusion of individuality at the heart of self-professed liberal democracies, which now require first and foremost that one adhere to certain parameters of citizenship, including fashion, which is quite simply the inverse critique levied against ultra-orthodox Islamic theological interpretations. Simply put, one must take off the veil so that one can wear another, which is grounded in an othered space. In taking up the question of dress and the “thingness” of the veil, as br1 puts it, his work destabilizes the hijab’s meaning as it reflects solely on its interpretative context as a symbol of simultaneous limitation and liberation within public space. [pic 12] Explaining the intricacies of his aesthetic in regards to (multi)cultural imag(in)ings of hijab and female Islamic identity, br1 notes:

I have two modus operandi on my poster: in one hand I love to show the different styles of veil in the world. If you think, how many people in France have really seen a typical Afghani burqa? I want to show them. In the other hand I love to make posters with Muslim women that make typical things with passion and naturalness as western women. If you look at my first posters you can find an Iranian girl playing golf. Two years ago I don’t think that a Muslim woman can play golf. But it is so strange? Or many western people think that Muslim women can’t take a car license or smoking. It’s a wrong idea that we have of an different culture.57

The spatial and temporal fixation of female Muslim identity that subsists with the imag(in)ing of the veil forms the battleground upon which br1’s art combats the hegemonic policing of sense imposed by Late Capitalism. His exuberantly colorful representations, which are dramatically stark in comparison to the drabness of the streets as well as other street art, supports a reading of his work as centered on sensory engagement with the invisibility of female Muslim identity as ordinary and perhaps even common, which works to subvert the exceptionalism granted to discourses surrounding the veil by both sides of the debate. Ironically, but not surprisingly, it is his intentional depoliticization of the veil in his early work that effectively re-politicizes it as a site of contestation within public space as it relocates the sensory hegemony imparted by managers of national space seeking to perpetuate an imbalanced home economics. [pic 13-14] As part of an August 2010 collaborative endeavor with other artists in Berlin called the Tear Out the Blue Mask Project, br1’s aesthetic took a more critical turn when he installed an image of an Afghani woman with the country’s signature blue veil, or burqa, pulled above her head revealing what the artist describes as a look of “gloominess.”58 Set directly across the street from another installation showing a figure wearing the John A. Sweeney (269)

[pic 13-14] John A. Sweeney (270)

burqa, this duet offers a more direct engagement with the “condition of many afghani women, compelled to appear in public spaces hidden behind a sort of mask: the burqa.”59 Taking up the masking of women within public space, br1’s composite installation refocuses the veil debate within a transnational context by revealing/concealing the plight of women in Afghanistan to European observers at a time when the latter’s leaders, including and perhaps especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel, contend that “the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other ... has failed, utterly failed.”60 This proposed failure, which coincides with widespread economic uncertainty, finds its clearest expression in br1’s presence/absence work, which might be read alongside Merkel’s remarks as a tangled testament to the home economics—the ongoing “process of hierarchically organizing various groups of people through differential state categories of belonging”—driving the discourses and policies, which rely upon a masking of nationalist desire, surrounding the hijab and Muslim minorities across Europe.61 Ironically, this masking is as much a veil as the hijab itself, and Merkel’s comments solidify the distinction between being welcomed and being embraced—the question of belonging par excellence. She explains, “We should not be a country which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don’t speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here.”62 Welcoming one to Germany in spite of their obvious linguistic “deficiency,” especially if they seek gainful employment, is one thing, but embracing one’s agency with equal access to see and be seen, politically speaking, is something else entirely. Consequently, br1’s burqa duet embodies this troubling distinction at the heart of the EU’s nascent post-multiculturalist home economics. if Shepard Fairey is the face of street art, then Banksy is the veritable ghost in the machine of the movement. Emerging as an international celebrity following the release of “the world’s first street art disaster movie,” Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for a 2010 Academy Award in the Best Documentary category, the anonymous artist continues to make waves across continents with his prolific street installations [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTlm6dU2xHk]. From London to Los Angeles, Banksy’s art, which has been supplemented by numerous books that include some of his thoughts on art and the state of the world, is perhaps the hottest aesthetic commodity in the world, which has led some to take the extreme measure of removing entire walls covered with his work63, placing clear plastic coverings over his street installations, and organizing tours of his work across London.64 Although the film did much to enshrine his renown, Banksy caught the eye of the media in 2006 when he visited Palestine to apply some of his street art to the Israeli separation wall. Addressing his interest in the wall during a 2006 interview with Shepard Fairey in Swindle Magazine, Banksy intimated, “Every graffiti writer should go there. They’re building the biggest wall in the world. I painted on the Palestinian side, and a lot of them weren’t sure about what I was doing. They didn’t understand why I wasn’t just writing ‘down with Israel’ in big letters and painting pictures of the Israeli prime minister hanging from a rope. And maybe they had a point [http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=XXSg8BApBwA].”65 As Banksy’s unrepentant sentiments and self-effacing tone attest, his exuberance for the wall was as equally about his art as it was about making a political statement, and perhaps more than any other street artist, Banksy is forthcoming about the power of street art to enact change...or not. In 2001’s Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall, he quips, “Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars and generally is the voice of people who aren’t listened to. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have it you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.”66 Banksy’s mention of a body reterritorializing public space, even if only as a toilet, speaks to the redistribution of the sensible and the attentiveness to the everyday that permeates his respective corpus, and while the anonymous artist is known around the world, his provincial beginnings in England, which has seen its Muslim population rise from 1.65 million to 2.87 million over the last ten years, clearly have been impactful on his aesthetic corpus. [pic 15] in his most direct representation of the veil to date, Banksy’s How Do You Like Your Eggs offers what might best be described as an ideologically scrambled image. Offering a burqa-clad woman holding a frying pan filled with a sunny-side-up egg in one hand and a spatula in the other while wearing an apron printed with a lingerie-clad torso, this complex piece appears to have been crafted specifically for a show at the Bristol Museum in 2009, and it epitomizes the artist’s body of work on Islamic identity, including his rogue installment of a life-sized Guantanamo detainee at Disneyland as captured in Exit Through The Gift John A. Sweeney (271)

[pic 15] John A. Sweeney (272)

Shop and elsewhere.67 Exploding the representational and symbolic categories of the veil, the painting strikes at the heart of Late Capitalism’s home economics, which sets out to extract hijab from female Islamic identity. With its simultaneous imag(in)ing of the figure as caring mother, sexual being, and jovial, yet pious, Muslim, any static positionality of female Muslim identity is thwarted through the affect of multiplicity where the intentionality of the spectator’s specific impression of the piece is second to his/her general degree of apperceptive uncertainity. As an artist, Banksy seems to have found a way to veil hijab through an amorphous representation of female Islamic identity that is both unified, in its comedic undertones, and radically fractured, in its deep ideological complexity. this creative tension, which also resides at the heart of female identity in economies of desire, conceals/reveals the masking of female Islamic identity inculcated by nationalist governmentalities seeking to re-dress their citizenry. Affirming, if not preferring, hyper-sexualized representations of female identity as part and parcel of Late Capitalism’s exploitive home economics, the desiring body within Banksy’s work is at once homely and the exotic other, which moves the observer to reconsider the locus of sexuality within public space. In locating the veil-wearer in the home, as the portrait suggests, the piece works to disrupt the normative discourse of the veil as inhibitor to female identity while equally interfering with the theological formulation that wearing the veil at home is unnecessary, which implies that the home itself has become public space—thus, attacking the theo-national configuration of space from ultra-orthodox fundamentalist perspectives as being radically separate. noting the contours of female Islamic identity and the ideological duality at the heart of the veil in regards to what is at stake in public space, Berger writes, “The Koran does indeed refer to female body parts as ornaments, making them indistinguishable from artifactual ones. The hijab, then, veils the excesses of visibility (implied by the “adornment”) as much as the lack of visibility (the blind “eye”), in a single fold which shows the reciprocal implication of the logic of lack and that of excess.”68 In ornamenting the veil, Banksy collapses the othered lacking logic of excess essential to the economy of desire driving Late Capitalism; furthermore, hijab, both in Banksy’s representation and in non-Muslim majority contexts, serves as a stark reminder of the inherent relativity of the rapacious mechanisms seeking to nationalize public space, if only through its hyper-sexualization. Commenting on critical Islamic perspectives on the female body and public space, Scott notes, “Modest dress declares that sexual relations are off-limits in public places. Some Muslim feminists say this actually liberates them, but whether it does or not, or whether, indeed, every woman who wears a headscarf understands its symbolism in this way, the veil signals the acceptance of sexuality and even its celebration, but only under proper circumstances—that is, in private, within the family. This is a psychology not of denial but of recognition.”69 Recognizing the denial of female identity at the heart of the veil controversy, Banksy’s aesthetic offering celebrates the symbolic aesthetic freedom available within such debates for those willing to explore the myriad textures and flows of sense that craft the routine and, at times, uneasy experience of public space—after one has had breakfast of course.

Capitalism is Boring

“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like this and stop leaning against that wall—it’s wet.”70

in 2006, a one-line freehand tag appeared in a back alley just outside Oxford—capitalism is boring. Although the identity of the artist remains unknown, this well-known punk call to arms from the early 1980’s, which can now be found on T-shirts in countless boutiques across the world, resonates with street art’s creative re-imag(in)ing of public space, which, as Banksy sees it, is anything but boring. When the anonymous artist famously scrawled “bored” on the side of a large building and used the same message as a backdrop for a 2010 canvas piece featuring a man intensely examining the piece as if he were a buyer, trader and/or speculator on the (cultural and otherwise) capital that is street art, Banksy took aim at both material and spiritual economies driving the communis sensus of Late Capitalism, which relegates agency, subjectivity, identity, as well as art to a sensory and economic commodity. [pic 16-18] John A. Sweeney (273)

[pic 16-18] John A. Sweeney (274)

in some ways, to be bored is to lack sense itself, and Banksy’s deployment of the term across various media embodies the antithetical “logic of representation” at the root of street art.71 Working around, on, and, at times, within the discourses surrounding the veil and the breakdown of multiculturalism in Europe and elsewhere, street art offers a uniquely political, which is to say sensory, mode of contestation, even if only imag(in)ed, to the ideological forces underlying nationalist economies of desire of and for public space as home, again if only imag(in)ed. Although street artist’s have a tenuous and, at times, parasitical relationship with Islam, in theory if not in image, it is evident that the medium’s radical critiques of unitary identity, as found within Late Capitalism and ultra-orthodox Islamic theology, offer decidedly ambiguous representations of identity as affronts to the familiar, secure, and communal modes of sensation that drive nationalist governmentalities, which cut across space and time towards the groundless space of the (perhaps repressed if not policed) unconscious. Explicating the tripartite managerial strategies contained within nationalist fantasies of home, Hage observes:

When the nationalist feels that he or she can no longer operate in, communicate in or recognise the national space in which he or she operates, the nation appears to be losing its homely character. Familiarity is essential for a sense of community, but the latter also requires a sense of shared symbolic forms and the existence of support networks of friends and relatives. Security is impossible without familiarity and community, but it also involved the possibility of satisfying one’s basic needs and an absence of threatening otherness.72

Using familiarity, community and security as the holy trinity of home economics’ divinely imag(in)ed denial of alterity, nationalist governmentalities, which certainly underly the French veil ban, set out to deny the very sense of otherness within public space by forging a (dry) national space where one’s citizenship, even and perhaps especially through fashion, denotes compliance, if not complicity for which there is no re-dress—in other words, the police have been mobilized. Situating nationalist home economics as the requisite political response to the progressively catastrophic mechanisms of Late Capitalism, one can begin to sense the ontological underpinnings of post- multiculturalist Europe, which is slowly reterritorializing public space into national space as a sort of culturally home-ostatic police state. Writing as the tide of Islamaphobia began rising but before the emergence of the most recent nationalist discourses on the veil and multiculturalism in Europe, Žižek remarks, “Martin Amis recently attacked Islam as the most boring of all religions, demanding its believers to perform again and again the same stupid rituals and learn by heart the same sacred formulas—he was deeply wrong: it is multicultural tolerance and permissiveness which stand for real boredom.”73 Under the aegis of Late Capitalism, however, boredom has turned into a sort of (fashionista) fascism as nationalist governmentalities scramble to clean up the mess of capital run amok. It is now clear that Žižek’s boredom can now be found within post-multiculturalist discourses—many of which blame the endemic failures of capitalism on diasporic Muslim communities whose attachment to home, either through the veil or through the maintenance of spiritual and cultural capital, signifies a tacit rejection of the divinely ordained home economics of Late Capitalism. In spite of the wishes of the policing spatial managers, one can never go home again, as the saying goes. Offering complex challenges and self-effacing critiques to this veiled home economics of Late Capitalism, street art imag(in)es public space as something more than a site where (fashion) police dutifully stroll their beat searching back alleys for burqas, including and perhaps especially those that have yet to dry.

Notes 1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Pbk. Ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006). 2 Steven Erlanger, “French Ban on Veils Goes Into Force,” http://www.nytimes.com, April 11, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/world/europe/12france.html?_r=1. 3 Nandita Sharma, Home economics : nationalism and the making of “migrant workers” in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 18. 4 Nazia Hussain, Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France, At Home in Europe Project (New York NY USA: Open Society Foundation, April 2011), 19, http://www.soros.org/initiatives/ home/articles_publications/publications/unveiling-the-truth-20110411. John A. Sweeney (275)

5 Robert Marquand, “Why Europe is turning away from multiculturalism,” http://www.csmonitor.com, March 4, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0304/Why-Europe-is-turning-away-from- multiculturalism. 6 Davide Panagia, “The improper event: on Jacques Rancière’s mannerism,” Citizenship Studies 13 (June 2009): 298. 7 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, Reprint. (New York: Verso, 2009), 13. 8 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22. 9 Jacques Rancière, “The Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions,” in Jacques Rancière: history, politics, aesthetics, ed. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 275. 10 Ghassan Hage, White nation : fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society (New York NY ;Annandale NSW: Routledge ;;Pluto Press, 2000), 45. 11 Hussain, Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France, 11. 12 Hage, White nation, 47. 13 Sarah Halim and Marian Meyers, “News Coverage of Violence Against Muslim Women: A View From the Arabian Gulf,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3, no. 1 (March 2010): 86. 14 Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, “The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil,” diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 102. 15 Banu Gökariksel and Ellen McLarney, “Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 7. 16 Cedar Lewisohn, Street art : the graffiti revolution (New York NY: Abrams, 2008), 15. 17 Ibid., 21. 18 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22. 19 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement : politics and philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29. 20 Shepard Fairey, “The Medium is the Message,” in Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey (Gingko Press, 2006), 184. 21 Slavoj Zizek, “A Glance into the Archives of Islam,” http://www.lacan.com, 2006, http://www.lacan.com/zizarchives.htm. 22 Faegheh Shirazi, The veil unveiled : the hijab in modern culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 2. 23 Hage, White nation, 17. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 32. 26 Ibid., 42. 27 Ibid., 39. 28 Shirazi, The veil unveiled, 107. 29 Zizek, “A Glance into the Archives of Islam.” 30 Fadwa El Guindi, Veil : modesty, privacy, and resistance, Paperback ed. (Oxford UK; New York NY: Berg, 2000), 157. 31 Hussain, Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France, 13. 32 Haleh Afshar, “Can I see your hair? Choice, agency and attitudes: the dilemma of faith and feminism for Muslim women who cover,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 2 (February 2008): 28. 33 Berger, “The Newly Veiled Woman,” 103. 34 Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, “The Feminization of Public Space: Women’s Activism, the Family Law, and Social Change in Morocco,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 92. 35 Jose C. M. van Santen, “‘My “veil” dos not go with my jeans’: veiling, fundamentalism, education and women’s agency in northern Cameroon,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 80, no. 2 (2010): 296. 36 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1992), 47. 37 Norma Claire Moruzzi, “Trying to Look Different: Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 28, no. 2 (2008): 227. John A. Sweeney (276)

38 Ibid., 233. 39 Sharma, Home economics, 29. 40 Jacques Rancière, “The politics of aesthetics,” 16beaver, May 5, 2006, http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001877.php. 41 Banksy, Banging your head against a brick wall ([United Kingdom]: Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2001). 42 Omar Sacirbey, “10 Minutes With...10 minutes with … Shepard Fairey,” Religion News Service, November 18, 2009, http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/tenminutes/10_minutes_with_shepard_ fairey/. 43 Ibid. 44 Berger, “The Newly Veiled Woman,” 109. 45 Angelique Chrisafis, “Cornered – Princess Hijab, Paris’s elusive graffiti artist,” http://www.guardian.co.uk, November 11, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/nov/11/princess-hijab-paris-graffiti- artist. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Arwa Aburwara, “Veiled Threat: The guerrilla graffiti of Princess Hijab,” http://bitchmagazine.ord, 2009, http://bitchmagazine.org/article/veiled-threat. 49 Wooster Collective, “Putting on the Veil,” http://www.good.is, November 24, 2009, http://www.good.is/ post/putting-on-the-veil/. 50 Aburwara, “Veiled Threat: The guerrilla graffiti of Princess Hijab.” 51 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus : capitalism and schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 32. 52 Chrisafis, “Cornered – Princess Hijab, Paris’s elusive graffiti artist.” 53 Gökariksel and McLarney, “Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry,” 2. 54 Chrisafis, “Cornered – Princess Hijab, Paris’s elusive graffiti artist.” 55 “ekosystem blog » BR1 & Muslim women,” By the Time You Read This I’ll Already Be Gone, December 15, 2009, http://blog.ekosystem.org/2009/12/br1-muslim-women/. 56 Slavoj Zizek, Violence : six sideways reflections, 1st ed. (New York: Picador, 2008), 145. 57 “ekosystem blog » BR1 & Muslim women.” 58 br1, “BR1 | gorlitzer ufer berlin,” http://www.flickr.com, August 1, 2010, http://www.flickr.com/photos/br1art/5058992183/in/photostream/. 59 Ibid. 60 Matthew Clark, “Germany’s Angela Merkel: Multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed’,” Global News Blog, October 17, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/1017/Germany-s-Angela-Merkel-Multiculturalism- has-utterly-failed. 61 Sharma, Home economics, 4. 62 Clark, “Germany’s Angela Merkel: Multiculturalism has ‘utterly failed’.” 63 Mark Stryker, “Graffiti artist Banksy leaves mark on Detroit and ignites firestorm,” http://www.citizen- times.com, May 15, 2010, http://www.citizen-times.com/article/C4/20100515/ENT05/100514077/Graffiti- artist-Banksy-leaves-mark-Detroit-ignites-firestorm?odyssey=nav%7Chead. 64 Charlotte Higgins, “Street art tours reveal hidden treasure | Art and design,” http://www.guardian.co.uk, April 22, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/apr/22/street-art-tour-hidden-treasure. 65 Shepard Fairey, “BANKSY,” Swindle Magazine, 2006, http://swindlemagazine.com/issue08/banksy/. 66 Banksy, Banging your head against a brick wall. 67 “Artist Banksy targets Disneyland,” BBC News, September 11, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/5335400.stm. 68 Berger, “The Newly Veiled Woman,” 106. 69 Joan Scott, The politics of the veil (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 171. 70 Robin Banksy, Existencilism ([Bristol]: [s.n.], 2002). 71 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 22. 72 Hage, White nation, 40. 73 Zizek, “A Glance into the Archives of Islam.” John A. Sweeney (277)

Image Credits [pic 1] http://hijabmam.wikispaces.com/file/view/veils.gif/59853574/veils.gif [pic 2] http://lisawallerrogers.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/burka-in-france.jpg [pic 3] http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-photo/nineteen68/1/1246794871/believe-in-the-spray-can.jpg/ tpod.html [pic 4] Faegheh Shirazi, The veil unveiled : the hijab in modern culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 107. [pic 5] Shepard Fairey, Obey Giant, http://obeygiant.com [pic 7] Shepard Fairey, Muslim Woman Offset, http://obeygiant.com/prints/muslim-woman-offset [pic 8] Shepard Fairey, Arab Woman Gold, http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewflannery/2659818224/ [pic 9] Princess Hijab, http://yaplog.jp/cv/princesshijab/img/2/dolche_4_p.jpg [pic 10] http://www.ashleyb.org/images/princess_hijab.jpg [pic 11] http://www.gradientmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/br1-street-art-turin-italy- muslim-03.jpg [pic 12] http://www.gradientmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/br1-street-art-turin-italy- muslim-01.jpg [pic 13] br1, tear out the blue mask, http://www.flickr.com/photos/br1art/5058992183/in/photostream [pic 14] br1, tear out the blue mask, http://www.flickr.com/photos/br1art/5059604222/in/photostream [pic 15] banksy, how do you like your eggs?, http://www.banksy.co.uk/shop/images/shop%20large/ howdoyoulikeyoureggs-.jpg [pic 16] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TXIAcF5Dzuc/TV0Q0NC7WDI/AAAAAAAAAPg/F K4727rlacg/s1600/ capitalism%2Bis%2Bboring2.jpg [pic 17] http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahwilliams/7585473/ [pic 18] http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/photos/banksy_boring_appreciation.jpg

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