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NP 107 (Dream House 21)

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The veil. At the inauguration of this historical revision that is The Horde, the metaphor of the veil is placed front and center. In itself the veil, in this text, is a flash of revelation and constitutes an intense invitation to unpack its meaning. We are invited to experience a reverence, a quietness, something experiential. And as Favreau writes, The Horde as a whole will be an unveiling, “This book reveals the Horde’s story.” And of course, to repeat, the veil is one of violence, misconception, “old stereotypes of marauding plunderers,” and it hides the true complex reality of social organization, successful empire, a truth that both mirrors our contemporary idea of global capital and demotes and thereby obscures whatever violence might have undergirded that empire, as well as what has been designated as the veil. Favereau is bringing forward, displacing a veil by enabling the emergence of what it hides. The historiography resides completely in the terms set up by K3a,2, “natural form” equating to the story that displaces violence and wants to bring complex social organization forward, even as that displacement itself is a new violence. The historiography, seen by way of K3a2, is one where the falseness of the veil equates to the technological, appearing without our intervention and overwhelming us, a definitional characteristic of this particular stereotype (and perhaps all stereotype). 

But there’s a question as to whether Favereau’s invocation of veil, at this moment in the narrative, with this type of emphasis and centrality, isn’t, or can be anything other than, a citation of W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, where in nearly identical measure “veil” is introduced as a centrally consequential modality of understanding experience. It is a very difficult thing, this reference, as difficult as it is to completely grasp, without changing everything one is doing, Du Bois’s reference to the “veil” itself—which he himself sets up as object, was attempting to grasp. Without doubt, and especially since The Horde is a story told by a white person about a nonwhite population, the reference to “veil” more or less overtly racializes, even as it deracinates, the story The Horde is attempting to tell.


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