Between matter and meaning: the trope of the Kopftuchmädchen

ABSTRACT Recent transdisciplinary formations in the humanities, including new materialisms and ANT, but also in black studies, are recalibrating our understanding of the human and the posthuman as categories of analysis. They have revealed the post-Enlightenment conceptualisation of the universal human to be both epistemologically untenable and violently Eurocentric, and furthermore laid bare how techniques of differentiation along axes of gender, race, sexuality, religion always also serve to institute the human and its nonhuman, posthuman, more-than-human, less-than-human counter parts. Theorising the material-semiotic figuration inhering in the German compound noun ‘Kopftuchmädchen’ (headscarfgirl) – a term that emerged out of and has become synecdotal for anti-Muslim public discourse – this article proposes that the human and the posthuman should be understood as structuring objects and subjects of knowledge in the study of Orientalism. After all, most contemporary Orientalisms mark cultural difference as a grander problem of (intra)human difference, one distinguishing between a (Western) culture of universal humanity and an (Orientalised) culture of problematic posthuman entanglement. The afore-mentioned compound noun points to a self-referential entanglement of matter and meaning that Occidentalises that which it posits as Universal Human and Orientalises its human-nonhuman Other, while thereby also concealing, in Latourian terms, ‘the West’s’ own nonmodern, human-nonhuman constitution(s).