W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “The Veil” has been critically analyzed by scholars and artists alike since he first used the phrase in his ground-breaking book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” at the turn of the 20th century. “The Veil” was a literary and philosophical translation of the lives of people of African descent in the Americas.
It operated as a soothsayer, a third eye or as referred to within the book a second sight. This forward-thinking vision continues today as it functions as a guide or perspective lens for people of African descent to re-imagine the struggle within a system built on structural racism.
This series re-imagines lifting “The Veil” allowing the second sight that was systematically denied to children held by chattel slavery. Deprived of opportunity, dehumanized and cloaked by the veil. By re-imagining slave children’s unfettered access to what DuBois referred to within the book as “Paideia” they are now provided with vision and a future. As Dr. Cornell West states in “Living and Loving Out Loud,”
“Paideia concerns the cultivation of the self, the ways you engage your own history, your own memories, your own mortality, your own sense of what it means to be alive as a critical, loving, aware human being.”
(Cornel West, Living and Loving Out Loud, p. 22)
This series allows a creative expression that merges the concepts of Afrofuturism, and African Diaspora to become a re-imaginative production. Fusion within “The Veil,” allows the concept of paideia to be seen through an enhanced lens for critical interrogation. A space to create re-imagined realities by removing the stigma of otherism. In this series we do not ask for permission to identify the sensation of a double consciousness by lifting the veil; it envisions the world with unlimited opportunity and access and actually creates the vision.
“Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.”
-W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)