On Certainty and Doubt

Through an examination of the Muslim call to prayer opening Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), this article examines epistemological questions concerning certainty and doubt generated by the speculative turn in Black feminist film and media historiography. Because of the deferred structure of Qur’ānic revelation, as well as the tradition of reporting and transcribing the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam has a vantage on the notion of testimony that is helpful in understanding the kinds of faith necessitated by the imaginative reconstructions integral to Black feminist film history and the modes of critical utterance animating Black feminist historiography. But generative points of tension arise when discussing Islamic scripture in conjunction with Black feminist film historiography, the article argues, particularly because of the role that certainty plays within the Qur’ānic tropology of belief. Those constraints shed light on the limits of faith within Black feminist historiography itself, as well as the conspicuous absence of the secular criticism debates within film and media studies.