Over the summer, please read Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil. This is a book
about a recent political controversy in France, which arose after the
government passed a law prohibiting schoolchildren from wearing “conspicuous
signs of religious affiliation.” While this law expressly forbade symbols of
any major religion, it was primarily targeted at Muslim girls who wore the hijab, or headscarf. Scott studies the
controversy as a “political discourse,” by which she means a public
conversation through which people struggle to give meaning to some phenomenon.
The wearing of headscarves is a phenomenon that was given a variety of
meanings, and is an issue that is simultaneously about national identity,
post-colonial immigration, religious fundamentalism and feminist liberation.
Those are all themes that constitute major components of European history in the
modern era, and we will spend significant time on all of them in the coming
months. I think this book will help us remember that those issues are very much
alive in the present, and not simply relegated to the past.
To guide your reading of the book, please compose a
two-three page essay that addresses some of the major questions posed by the
book. You have three options as to how you go about this task: 1) you could
write a description of the major issues and show how they are all bundled up
together in the headscarf controversy, 2) you could write a historical piece,
tracing the origins of one or more issue back through history (for example,
showing how immigration from North Africa resulted from France’s colonization
of that part of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), or 3) you
could write an opinion piece, agreeing or disagreeing with components of the
issue or Scott’s interpretation of them.
Whatever response you choose, it will be very important that
it be firmly grounded in a slow and careful reading of the book. This is a
difficult text; please do not wait until September to begin it. Please note
that the introduction is very important in that it establishes Scott’s approach
and raises some of the central political and ideological tenets that her
treatment of the subject is built upon. Read the introduction carefully. Read
it more than once. Refer back to it as you work your way through.
Overall, I hope you enjoy the book and I anticipate it will
inform some very lively discussion in the first weeks of the school year. Good
luck and Godspeed!
Mr. Stegeman
